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Relativity’s first 3D-printed rocket aims to debut a new rocket fuel
Relativity can almost taste the vacuum of space. A substantial amount of work remains, but the startup continues to defy expectations with its relentless and methodical push towards the first orbital launch of a 3D-printed rocket.
Founded in 2015, the Los Angeles-based aerospace company has taken its few years of obligatory delays in stride while pursuing a 2020 debut for its (relatively) small Terran 1 rocket. In a world with dozens of serious rocket startups, missing one’s initial launch target is practically a rite of passage – the path to orbit is never as straight and bump-free as the highway on-ramps that are often promised in pitch decks. Relativity Space, however, is no average rocket startup.
Save for SpaceX, which operates in a league of its own, no other private rocket startup has come close to matching the $1.3 billion Relativity has raised to develop Terran 1 and the much larger Terran R. More importantly, in a recent interview with Aviation Week, CEO Tim Ellis (a former Blue Origin engineer) revealed that the company could be “weeks away” from the first launch of Terran 1, a rocket that is 85% 3D-printed by mass and could simultaneously debut a new kind of rocket fuel.
Once fully assembled, Terran 1 – weighing around 9.3 tons (~20,500 lb) empty and measuring 33.5 meters (110 ft) tall – will be the largest metal 3D-printed object in the history of the technology. From that perspective, it’s hardly surprising that Relativity Space is a few years behind schedule. In fact, it’s odd that the startup isn’t more delayed, and it’s even more impressive that Terran 1’s first launch campaign has gone as smoothly as it has.
Slow, Smooth and Fast
Terran 1 Flight 1’s booster stage and upper stage both arrived at the company’s leased Cape Canaveral Space Force Station LC-16 pad sometime in May 2022. Terran 1’s first stage came directly from the California factory. The second stage (S2), however, first shipped to a Mississippi test stand a few months prior and, on its first try, completed a full-duration multi-minute static fire test known as a mission duty cycle (MDC) – about as close as it’s possible to get to replicating orbital upper stage operations on the ground. The flawless MDC was preceded by a number of simpler precursor tests, of course, but the rocket performed more or less as expected throughout the entire qualification program. If Terran’s second stage ignites again, it’ll be at the edge of space.
Since June, the critical path for Terran 1’s launch debut has thus been qualifying the first finished Terran booster. Rather than modify its Mississippi test facilities, Relativity decided to temporarily modify its heavily upgraded LC-16 pad to support booster qualification testing. Thanks to the heroic work of a shockingly small team of five people, the pad was ready to kick off testing as soon as the Terran 1 booster arrived in Florida. Even more surprisingly, senior manager Lorenzo Locante says that LC-16 – practically a new pad after Relativity’s extensive modifications – has “performed perfectly” during every booster qualification test attempted thus far.
That testing has included pneumatic proofing (an ambient-temperature gas pressure test), possible cryogenic proof tests, multiple rounds of propellant loading, preignition testing of its nine Aeon engines, and multiple spin-start tests (the last step before static fire testing) with the same engines. Given that LC-16 and Terran 1 must handle cryogenic oxidizer (liquid oxygen) and cryogenic fuel (liquid methane), which can easily create a flammable and bomb-like mixture of gases from even the smallest of leaks, it’s difficult to emphasize just how difficult it is to ensure that a complex launch pad and rocket perform nominally during their first joint testing.
According to engineers onsite during a private Teslarati tour of Relativity’s Florida launch facilities, Terran 1 S1’s next goal is to fully ignite its Aeon engines. After one or more successful static fires, the booster will be integrated with the upper stage and nosecone for a final full-duration static fire test that will also double as a full wet dress rehearsal (WDR). Testing the fully-integrated Terran 1 rocket will only be possible once LC-16’s full strongback and launch mount (also known as a transporter/erector) is completed, but that final piece of the puzzle should be ready any day now.
De Terra Ad Astra
The coming weeks will likely be some of the company’s riskiest and most difficult yet. If the rocket and LC-16 continue to operate as smoothly as they have been, however, there’s a nonzero chance that Terran 1 could beat the likes of SpaceX (Starship), Blue Origin (New Glenn), and the United Launch Alliance (Vulcan Centaur) to the punch to become the first methane and oxygen-fueled rocket in history to attempt an orbital launch.*
*While SpaceX’s Starship is technically the first large-scale suborbital methalox rocket to attempt (and complete) a launch, there has never been an orbital methalox launch attempt.
Capable of carrying up to 1.25 tons (~2750 lb) to low Earth orbit for as little as $12 million, Terran 1 also has a shot at becoming the first new privately-developed 1-ton-class rocket of any kind to successfully reach orbit. On that front, though, Relativity is in a neck-and-neck race with Firefly Aerospace and ABL Space, both of which intend to launch similarly-sized rockets at some point in the next few months. It’s never been less clear who will cross the finish line first but one would be hard-pressed to count Relativity out.
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SpaceX hid behind another name in the Arizona desert, and now it’s going big
SpaceX puts a $50 billion price on its Arizona supercompute campus ahead of December’s hearing.
SpaceX has put a price tag on the supercomputer campus it wants to build in the southern Arizona desert. In a statement Thursday, the company said it is pursuing a roughly $50 billion supercompute campus in Cochise County, about 80 miles east of Tucson. Together with a separate facility planned at Starbase, Texas, the two projects add up to more than $74 billion in planned investment.
The Arizona figure had not been disclosed before. SpaceX’s involvement only became public on November 4, when company representatives hosted a packed town hall at Cochise Elementary School for an application filed under the name Tombstone Resources LLC. A SpaceX representative told residents the filing used another name because putting SpaceX on it “draws attention” from outside the county, local station KVOA reported.
The application describes a 747-acre site near the Willcox Playa with up to nine buildings of about 493,000 square feet each. SpaceX plans to bring the campus online in four phases of roughly 1.5 GW, reaching 6 GW at full build, backed by a 24 GWh battery system and about $3.6 billion in grid upgrades. At that size, it would draw about 2.5 times more power than every data center in Maricopa County combined, according to an Arizona Republic analysis.
SpaceX says the project will create about 5,500 construction jobs and 1,000 permanent jobs, and that it could cut electricity bills for members of the local cooperatives by up to 20 percent. The campus would use dry cooling with no industrial groundwater use. Its application estimates ongoing water needs of 7 to 10 acre-feet a year, roughly what 20 to 30 homes consume.
Power is the bigger question. The site sits next to the Apache Generating Station, a coal and natural gas plant with about 1 GW of capacity that had been slated to retire by 2028. SpaceX told residents its investment could expand the station to more than 6 GW.
Local opposition is organized. A petition asking the county to deny the permit has gathered about 2,400 signatures, and the nearby playa is a landing spot for federally protected sandhill cranes, which SpaceX says its design accounts for. The Cochise County Planning and Zoning Commission will hold a public hearing on December 9 in Bisbee, with written comments due November 27. If approved, construction could start in March 2027.
The Texas project faces a vote the same day. The Starbase City Commission will consider a property tax abatement for SpaceX’s $24 billion gas plant and supercompute facility at its own December 9 hearing, as Teslarati reported. SpaceX said Thursday the Starbase site has already generated more than 3,000 construction jobs, and it committed $220 million to Brownsville’s water and wastewater systems, $40 million of which has been paid.
Both campuses would expand a footprint still centered on the Memphis area, where SpaceX’s Colossus data centers run largely on gas turbines and the company won a permit for a power plant in Southaven, Mississippi earlier this year. SpaceX ended the third quarter with 1.7 GW of nameplate compute. The Arizona campus alone, at full build, would be more than three times that size.
Elon Musk
Nvidia’s board meets on Jensen Huang, and Elon Musk already has an answer
Elon Musk says it would be an honor to hire Jensen Huang amid Nvidia turmoil.
Elon Musk says he would welcome Jensen Huang at one of his companies if Nvidia’s board decides to push out its longtime chief executive.
On Wednesday evening, the financial account ZeroHedge posted “Elon please hire Jensen” on X. Musk replied roughly two hours later: “That would be an honor.” Neither Huang nor Nvidia had responded publicly as of Wednesday night.
Musk’s reply came as Nvidia’s board met to decide Huang’s future. The Wall Street Journal reported that directors were preparing to oust him following reports of two extramarital relationships. One involves Alice Huang, a Singapore-based businesswoman whom U.S. intelligence officials reportedly believe was working for China’s Ministry of State Security. The New York Times separately reported a relationship with Kimberly Powell, Nvidia’s vice president of health care. Huang acknowledged being unfaithful in a memo to employees on Sunday but gave no details.
@zerohedge That would be an honor
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 12, 2026
Under Nvidia’s bylaws, a majority of its 11 directors can remove the CEO with or without cause. Bloomberg reported that the board has been working with an outside firm on possible replacements and may name an interim chief, with CFO Colette Kress seen as the likely pick. Nvidia shares fell more than 8 percent in extended trading, according to CNBC, and the company is scheduled to report quarterly earnings on November 17.
Musk has more riding on Nvidia’s leadership than most tech executives. In August, he told investors on SpaceX’s first earnings call as a public company that it would build its AI infrastructure exclusively on Nvidia hardware, calling Vera Rubin “the best architecture.” SpaceX is also working with Nvidia on the compute payload for Starmind, its planned orbital AI constellation. In October, SpaceX said it had a binding commitment for a roughly $40 billion lease of Vera Rubin GPUs and related equipment, with the leases expected to begin in the first half of 2027.
The scale of that dependence is already enormous. On its Q3 call, SpaceX said it was bringing roughly 200,000 to 220,000 Nvidia GB300 GPUs online each month and expects 2.5 to 3 GW of nameplate compute by the end of the year. That buildout is now reaching new sites like the proposed $24 billion power plant and supercomputer campus at Starbase.
The relationship between the two executives also goes back nearly a decade. Huang has often told the story of personally delivering Nvidia’s first DGX-1 AI supercomputer to Musk in 2016, when no other customer wanted one. “Nobody wanted to be part of it, except for Elon,” Huang said on the Joe Rogan Experience last December.
Musk did not say what role Huang might fill, and his reply stops short of a formal offer. Huang co-founded Nvidia in 1993 and still owns about 3.6 percent of its stock, so any move to a Musk company would depend on whether, and how, he leaves the chipmaker he has run for more than three decades.
SpaceX officially launched the Starlink Mini 2 on November 10, delivering the first portable Starlink terminal designed around independent power.
Invitation-only preorders for select U.S. customers are priced at $999 plus tax, a figure that includes a full year of Roam Unlimited service valued at roughly $2,100. A refundable $100 deposit reserves the kit, with the balance due at shipment, expected to begin in mid-December. Broader availability is listed as coming soon.
Starlink just unveiled Mini 2, its next-gen portable dish.
Quick-swap battery, up to 4.5 hrs per charge
USB-C power
Built-in Wi-Fi
Online in about 60 secondsPreorders are open now. https://t.co/QawqgbswrQ
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) November 10, 2026
The headline feature is the quick-swap 71 Wh battery. Clipped to the rear of the dish without tools, it delivers up to 4.5 hours of connectivity on a single charge.
The 490-gram pack includes its own USB-C port and LED indicators, so users can charge a spare separately and swap it in seconds while staying online. Starlink notes that the terminal can continue operating while the battery charges or run directly from a 60 W USB-C source. The retail box includes one battery, a 60 W USB-C charger, and a 3-meter cable.
Beyond power, the Mini 2 is thinner at 23.1 mm (versus 38.5 mm on the original Mini) while measuring 263 × 314 mm. With the battery and kickstand attached it weighs 1.6 kg.
Built-in Wi-Fi 6 expands coverage to up to 1,800 square feet, an IP67 rating protects against dust and water, and a standard 1/4-20 tripod thread plus physical power button round out the design. Field of view remains 110 degrees, and the unit retains support for mobile use.
For travelers, campers, and remote workers, the swappable battery removes the longstanding requirement for an external power bank or vehicle outlet that defined the first Mini. Spare packs sold separately further extend runtime, turning the compact terminal into a more self-contained solution.
While the bundled $999 invitation price sits well above the original Mini’s current $149 starting point, the included year of service and genuine untethered operation mark a clear step forward in portable satellite internet.
SpaceX hid behind another name in the Arizona desert, and now it’s going big
Nvidia’s board meets on Jensen Huang, and Elon Musk already has an answer
