SpaceX, Blue Origin Engineers Start Own Space Rocket Startup To Take On Musk, Bezos

Relativity, an aerospace manufacturer startup, raised $140 million to launch rockets made through 3D printing into orbit.

On Tuesday, the Los-Angeles based company finished off its Series C funding from its assorted selection of well-known names including Mary Meeker, Lee Fixel, Michael Ovitz, Spencer Rascoff, Republic Labs, Y Combinator, Mark Cuban and Jared Leto.

With the funding secured, CEO Tim Ellis said that they have enough cash to fund Terran 1's launch in 2021.

The founders of the company, Ellis and Jordan Noone, are former engineers from Space X and Blue Origin. Noone, who is now the Chief Technology Officer for Relativity, used to work as a Propulsion Development Engineer for SpaceX. Ellis, on the other hand, was involved with propulsion development and 3D printing with Blue Origin.

Relativity Space's rockets will be made entirely through 3D printing which makes the process for building rockets cheaper and much faster. According to Ellis, it takes about 24 months to 36 months for companies to build rockets -- for them, it will only take 60 days.

Unlike Elon Musk's SpaceX and Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin, Relativity is in the smallsat niche. The focus of smallsat firms is to send lighter vehicles to space with payloads of usually under 1100 lbs. The $10 million Terran 1 will be a little over 2,000lbs and upgraded to a 3-meter payload fairing with two-times larger volume than before.

The company is also developing its Stargate Factory in Los Angeles to increase its print production capacity by four times.

"We believe the Stargate factory is a template for the future of aerospace manufacturing and provides Relativity's commercial customers, and eventually humanity, a faster, more reliable, and lower cost way to shuttle important resources from earth to outer space," said Noah Knauf, a Co-founder, and General Partner at Bond Capital.

Relativity is also increasing its infrastructure from 10,000 square feet to 480,000 square feet in 2019. Their workforce grew from 14 to 110 employees since 2018.