Inaugural flight of first (mostly) 3D-printed rocket aborted The inaugural launch of Terran-1, built by aerospace startup Relativity Space from 85 percent 3D-printed parts, was cancelled Wednesday. Scheduled to fly at 1300 ET from the US East Coast, the launch – code-named Good Luck, Have Fun, or GLHF – was pushed back due to propellant conditioning issues. Just before it was about to …
Seconded. Beyond the rocket science bits, I liked this paragraph, especially the supply chain reduction.
Relativity prides itself on being able to build rockets quickly and reuse them. The company claims it can build its vehicles in just 60 days, and doesn't suffer supply chain issues or delays since most components are 3D printed in house.
It did strike me though that they have two critical components that aren't made in house: the combustible bits and the stuff they make the rocket parts from. And given the fun I'm having trying to source jelly bean electronics parts, they probably still have significant external dependencies there...
Yeah I get you, it's unlikely they can print liquid oxygen or mine their own resource mats. I'm thinking that's a good reduction in supply chain. Perhaps they're creating a bottle neck, but any endeavour to launch will suffer those limitations.
I don't have any jelly beans, but you can have some of my jelly teddies if you like :)
Eliminating welds? 3D metal printing makes it nothing but welds! It's drop powdered metal, laser weld metal powder to previously deposited and welded metal powder, and repeat. Essentially this is like cast metal parts, which is considerably weaker than forged metal parts. There can be porosity problems in the metal using this technique, and this can cause stress risers that can have catadtrophic failures as a result. If they're paying close attention to the build it should be OK, but it's definitely a risky thing they're doing here. Looking forward to seeing how this plays out.
Some irony that the 2 original major manufacturers of rocket motors I used both build them around Si units (the hobby rocketry system classes motors by letter, C is 10N, D is 20N, E is 40N, F is 80N, etc) and has then always graphed their thrust profiles in N too. And those have been working that way for decades.
My whinge is that they keep saying first 3D printed rocket, then need to add some qualifiers because hobbyists have been 3D printing rockets either most components as with this one, or even whole rockets printed in single pieces (for smaller models, where designs suit that better than more complex, larger systems). Uni and school student teams have also been huge users of 3D printers for their rockets, it being the magic answer to all of 'don't know how to combine single components to achieve desired results' plus 'this is the future' and of course 'someone else is paying for the hardware/filament/lab tech who deals with the things that go wrong'.
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