3D printing of rockets We have talked about #3dprint -ing of | Tech for Good

3D printing of rockets

We have talked about #3dprint -ing of various stuff - homes, prosthetics, wood objects, human skulls. But what about printing rockets?

With the world's largest 3D metal printer, Relativity Space startup aims to print an entire space rocket, including fuel tanks and rocket engines, in just 60 days.

The way the printer works is the combination of lasers and plasma arc discharge melting raw material, an aluminum wire. The melting point of aluminum is 660 degrees Celsius (1221 F). So the printer melts the whole body of the rocket one tiny bit at a time, 10 inches a second (25 cm/s), to be more exact.

To build a traditional rocket, you first need to make building tools. For NASA's next rocket, the Space Launch System (SLS), it took 11 years of development to construct the vertical assembly center (VAC), a 170 foot (52 m) tool for welding together the rocket sections. In contrast, Relativity Space is only five years old, and they plan to launch their first rocket, Terran One, in 2022.

One of the other benefits of 3D printing is reducing the parts number. Imagine how hot the rocket's combustion chamber gets. The temperature inside is enough to boil iron. How does it not melt? Well, liquid hydrogen passes over and cools it. It is so cool that you can freeze stuff to the exterior of the chamber. That system has 1080 individual small pipes, all having to be welded together. It is an incredibly labor-intensive task. But with 3D printing, you can build all these small (about a 20th the thickness of a human hair) cooling channels as one piece with the chamber.

Logically, with a hundred times fewer parts, the 3D-printed rocket's cost is lower than a traditional one. The Relativity Space founder Tim Ellis says it is already five times less, and eventually, they can get to ten or even a hundred times less.

The first rocket, Terran One, will be a low earth orbit one. The second one, Terran R, can send a payload to the moon, to Mars. Launching to Mars and building an industrial base on the red planet is actually a long-term vision of the company. As Tim Ellis puts it, "it would expand the possibilities of human experience and what it means to be a person. Like we'd have YouTube channels on Mars, and people sharing what life on Mars is like versus earth."

It looks like Tim is not alone in that vision: the company's valuation vaulted to $4.2 billion after a $650 million funding round in summer 2021.

Terran One nose cone timelapse
If you're interested here is the longer video (20 minutes)

#space #3dprint #startups