About Tim Ellis
Tim Ellis, CEO and co-founder of Relativity Space, has been discussing the company's Terran R launch vehicle and its positioning in the growing market for low Earth orbit satellite constellations. In a Q1 2025 program update, Ellis stated that Terran R is designed to carry 20,000 kg to low Earth orbit, which he described as a "sweet spot" for serving mega-constellations. He said the company has a $2.9 billion backlog and emphasized that customers are seeking the best economics, high launch cadence, and a partner that will not compete with them. Ellis noted that reuse is critical both for cost and for achieving the ramp rate needed to launch dozens of times per year, and that demand is growing faster than any single supplier can serve.
In other appearances, Ellis has discussed his long-term vision of making humanity multi-planetary, describing the goal as expanding the possibilities of human experience. He has said that 3D printing is the inevitable technology for building an industrial base on Mars, and that Relativity Space aims to be the first company to develop it. Ellis has also spoken about the importance of customer collaboration, stating that he has engaged with large commercial operators from the inception of Terran R to ensure the vehicle meets market needs. He has described the company's approach as building a full launch system with software-defined manufacturing, contrasting it with traditional aerospace methods.
Source: AI-verified profile updated from Tim Ellis's recent appearances.
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✨ AI-enhanced transcript with speaker attribution
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Interviewer0:02
Thanks Deirdre. I'm joined now by Tim Ellis, CEO of Relativity Space. Tim, thank you so much for joining us today. I want to start off with the big question that all space geeks are wondering about: you've raised so much money, $685 million, but you haven't yet had a launch. What is the update on your launch timing?
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Tim Ellis0:21
Yeah, of course, Julia. So excited to be here. And as you mentioned, Relativity is 3D printing an entire rocket. So we've actually built not just our own launch vehicle to launch satellites to orbit, but also our own 3D printers, which are by far the largest in the world. We're on track to actually launch that rocket at the end of this year from our launch site at Cape Canaveral, Florida. We have two launch sites: one at Vandenberg Air Force Base, one at Cape Canaveral. We're only the fourth company to ever get a launch site with the Air Force at the Cape. And we're building rockets in a completely different way than it's been done before. Really, it's been true for the last 60 years that every aerospace factory you walk into today is building rockets one at a time by hand, on a bunch of fixed tooling and capex, with hundreds of thousands to millions of individual parts all assembled manually. So we really see 3D printing as an automation technology that replaces that tech stack and actually builds rockets much more quickly via software and data-driven technologies, which is what we're pioneering.
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Interviewer1:28
The 3D printing technology is certainly disruptive, revolutionary in terms of the way you're creating the rockets. But talk to me about the competitive landscape for the rockets themselves. One of your rockets will be competing directly with SpaceX. Why take on the leader in this space that has such a head start?
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Tim Ellis1:46
Yeah, of course. So I think actually it goes to what inspired me to start Relativity. I was building my career at Blue Origin, where I was a rocket propulsion engineer and founded the metal 3D printing division there, working with Jeff and the rest of the team. And then a lot of our team has worked in private space, both at SpaceX and other leading private space companies. So in our 400-person team, we've actually launched over 10,000 rockets among all of our team in the past couple decades. And so what we're really doing is I was inspired by SpaceX landing rockets and docking with the space station five years ago, and I founded Relativity. But despite all of that amazing and inspiring success, all their animations right when they got to Mars and people walked out faded to black. So for us, it was about Relativity building the second company that wants to go to Mars. It was our long-term mission from the point I founded it five years ago that we want to actually build humanity's industrial base on Mars. And we see 3D printing as the inevitable technology necessary to build that industrial base. So at some point in humanity's future, someone had to build this company to actually 3D print on Mars, and so we're actually joining SpaceX and making that happen.
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Interviewer3:02
So you've talked about 3D printing on Mars, but I want to ask you about that technology itself. Are there other ways to monetize or license your 3D printing technology beyond building the rocket ships and then also this longer-term plan of building infrastructure on Mars?
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Tim Ellis3:18
Yeah, of course. So we're starting with rockets. We're actually the most pre-sold rocket company in history before launch. We have sold more Terran Ones before ever flying than any company in history. So that's a really big kind of customer adoption, both with the DoD and NASA, as well as commercial companies as anchor customers. That's why we're starting with launch. We're also now building a rocket that's more than 20 times larger than our first one, that's fully reusable. But at the heart of it, like you mentioned, we really see 3D printing as a whole new tech stack for aerospace that is software and data driven and can iterate very, very quickly. And much like you've seen with gas internal combustion engines to electric, or on-premise servers to cloud, Relativity's pioneering 3D printing is a new tech stack that I believe will be the most disruptive technology in our lifetime for aerospace. So this is really more than just building and designing on rockets in a full-stack manner that we're doing today, but it really is about actually pioneering what I think is going to be the future of our society in the next 100 years with aerospace and 3D printing, as it's really a software-driven method to do it. And just one example is we're actually building a rocket from raw material to complete in 60 days from scratch, compared to two years that it takes traditionally.
