Terran 1, a rocket designed and built by the Relativity Space company, suffered a failure shortly after liftoff from a launch pad in Cape Canaveral, Florida, on Wednesday night. A demo mission, the rocket was not carrying people or a customer payload, and no one was injured.
The vehicle was powered by nine 3D-printed engines and would have been the first rocket launched into orbit using liquid methane as fuel. During a webcast of the flight on Wednesday, the rocket rose in a column of white flames that glowed blue as it shot into space.
But about four minutes into the flight, shortly after the rocket’s first stage fell, Clay Walker, launch director for Relativity Space, said on the company’s webcast that a “T-plus anomaly with stage two” had occurred. , which means that there was a problem with the second stage of the rocket, which was supposed to carry its payload into orbit.
The company’s webcast hosts said additional details about the issue would be announced at a later date.
Following the success of Elon Musk’s SpaceX, investors have poured money into spaceflight startups. Several of these companies have interplanetary ambitions, including Relativity Space, which announced last year that it would partner with another company called Impulse Space to send a private space mission to Mars, with the goal of beating Musk’s company to the red planet.
But many start-up spaceflight companies experience difficulties in their first attempts to reach orbit. In January, a Virgin Orbit spacecraft crashed within an hour of its flight; the company has since suspended employees. Another company, ABL space systems, lost its first rocket just after liftoff from a base in Alaska. And even established rocket builders lose new rockets on their first flight. Earlier this month, a new rocket built for Japan’s space agency by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, which has produced rockets for decades, failed minutes after its first flight, missing the satellite it was supposed to deploy.
Relativity’s flight on Wednesday did not lose a customer’s satellite. Its only payload was a wheel-shaped object, the first thing done on Relativity’s 3-D printers, which was to demonstrate the rocket’s ability to deliver a payload into orbit.
The flight, which the company dubbed “Good Luck Have Fun” or GLHF, was the company’s third launch attempt in the past two weeks. The previous two were canceled due to a series of technical problems shortly before takeoff.
During Wednesday’s launch, the company pointed out some of the milestones hit by the rocket. It was the first time that a 3D-printed rocket had reached “max-q”, the point at which the vehicle experiences the strongest stresses, and also stage separation, when the propellant used for liftoff falls from the second stage of the rocket. vehicle.
Relativity Space is among several startups making and testing small-lift launch vehicles — rockets that can carry smaller payloads of around two tons or less, typically with a low-Earth orbit destination.
At 110 feet tall, Terran 1 fell into this “small launch” category and is planned as a precursor to a much larger reusable launcher, Terran R, which the company hopes to start testing soon.
To make these rockets, Relativity Space has developed massive 3D printers in Long Beach, California, which use robotic arms to make motors and other parts from metal alloys that can withstand the heat and pressure of ignited rocket fuel.
Traditional manufacturing processes often slow down rocket construction. But 3D printers, which turn code into physical objects, allow engineers to go from design to test faster. Instead of having to create an entirely new part, engineers can instruct printers to increase the size of existing parts or modify them in other ways.
Because of this, there are many 3D printed parts in modern rockets. But Relativity Space treats 3D printers as a one-stop-shop for almost all of its rockets. About 85 percent of Terran 1’s mass was made using 3D printers, and each rocket can be made from scratch in 60 days.
Relativity is among several companies building rockets for launch into orbit using liquid oxygen and liquid methane as propellants. In the past, most rockets relied on hydrogen or kerosene for fuel. Methane, the main component of liquefied gas, is easier to store than hydrogen and offers better performance than kerosene. Starship, the next-generation rocket being built by SpaceX for missions to the Moon and Mars, will use similar boosters.
Carissa Christensen, founder and CEO of space analytics firm BryceTech, noted that of the hundreds of space startups created in recent years, only a handful have made it to the launch pad. This alone sets Relativity Space apart from many other private companies competing to launch rockets. It shows “something of a proof point of the investment thesis,” Christensen said in an interview earlier this month.
A launch attempt, whether successful or not, is something Ms. Christensen celebrates.
“It’s a step down the road of a complex engineering system,” he said of the Terran 1 flight. “Succeed or fail, you’ll learn something from it.”
