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Relativity Space reveals plans to rapidly upgrade 3D-printed Terran 1 rocket
teslarati.com – 24 Feb, 2022
Relativity Space has announced that it will only
launch the first version of its small Terran 1
rocket a handful of times before upgrading the
vehicle in ways that will aid work on a much
larger, fully reusable rocket. Relativity co-
founder and CEO Tim Ellis revealed the news in
a recent interview, explaining that while the
original Terran 1 rocket is still an integral part
of the company’s vision and success, it will
mainly serve as a bridge to the larger and more
capable Terran R – a rare rocket with the
potential to compete head-to-head with
SpaceX’s Falcon 9. “We’ve always envisioned
Terran 1 being a development platform,”
stated Ellis in an interview with Ars
Technica. The Terran 1 rocket, which is thrust
into orbit using nine proprietary Aeon-1
Once completed, Ellis says Relativity will shift
its focus away from the Aeon-1 engine setup
on Terran 1’s booster. Instead, they will
remove the nine Aeon-1 engines from the
vehicle and replace them with a single 135-ton-
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February 25, 2022
engines is designed to carry payloads into Low
Earth Orbit (LEO). The first launch of Terran 1 is
anticipated to take place by the end of 2022,
with Ellis stating that Relativity is “definitely
launching this year.” Terran 1’s first launch
won’t carry payloads, indicating its
experimental nature, but it will be serving as
the startup’s first orbital launch attempt.
Assuming the rocket’s debut is mostly
successful, Terran 1’s second mission will carry
a “Venture Class Launch Services” small
satellite payload for NASA. The third and final
mission for the first version of Terran 1 will also
carry payloads, though Relativity has yet to
reveal its customer(s).
thrust (~300,000 lbf) Aeon-R engine – seven of
which will eventually power Terran R’s
reusable booster. When asked why the startup
didn’t simply start with the Aeon-R engine, Ellis
noted that developing a booster with nine
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 Space @ a glance
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smaller Aeon-1 engines was “definitely not the
optimum choice in hindsight to get to orbit as
simply and quickly as possible for the Terran 1
program.” He added, “But it’s been part of our
plans to do a much larger reusable rocket for a
long time. So we chose to do liquid oxygen and
liquid methane engines, as well as the nine-
engine configuration on Terran 1 so that we
could learn as a company how to do something
that complex early on before we had to go
build this 20,000-kilogram payload-to-orbit
vehicle.” There are many benefits that come
from using the single Aeon-R engine on Terran
1, including reduced cost, processes, and more
capable rockets. By scaling down the number
of engines from nine Aeon-1s to one Aeon-Rs,
they are also scaling down the number of
turbopumps, which will reduce labor and cost.
The Aeon-R engine, seven of which will power
the Terran R rocket, will also produce nearly
~300,000 pounds of thrust. This will provide
the company with more capable small launch
vehicles.
Ultimately, Relativity’s goal is to launch Terran
R, a much larger, more powerful, and (in
theory) fully-reusable rocket. Ellis stated that
both the first and second stages of Terran R
will be reusable, potentially allowing the rocket
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February 25, 2022
to directly compete with Falcon 9 – and maybe
even the company’s fully-reusable Starship.
SpaceX’s workhorse rocket has successfully
launched 142 times and the company appears
to be more confident in it than ever before. In
2022 alone, SpaceX hopes to launch an average
of one Falcon rocket per week.
Despite the fact that SpaceX successfully
landed its first Falcon booster in 2015 and
reused a booster on a commercial launch in
2017, traditional competitors like Arianespace
and ULA have done little to respond and
continue to develop new rockets – Vulcan
Centaur and Ariane 6 – that are fully
expendable, substantially more expensive than
SpaceX’s offerings, and still without a clear
path to reusability. Alongside Blue Origin’s
New Glenn vehicle and Rocket Lab’s Neutron,
Relativity’s Terran R rocket may actually be
able to compete with Falcon 9. It is still unclear
how either stage of Terran R will be recovered,
nor how the rocket will integrate into the
already existing launch facilities being built for
Terran 1 at the Cape Canaveral Space Force
Station’s (CCSFS) LC-16 pad. Nonetheless, Ellis
and the entire Relativity team seem
determined to deliver on their promises.
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