Kind: captions
Language: en
this is the world's largest 3d metal
printer it was built by relativity space
a startup that aims to print an entire
rocket including fuel tanks and rocket
engines in just 60 days i like looking
inside a 3d printed rocket that is
actually going to go to space this giant
hunk of metal it's unbelievable this
video is sponsored by omaze offering you
the chance to win a trip to space more
about that at the end of the show
there's a lot of uv coming off the
welds you can film it but don't look
directly at it you get sunburned fast so
it's like you're suiting up to go in a
volcano all right we're gonna go in to
the 3d printer
and see how it works
all right so yep just hold this up don't
look at it
we are in the printer i can see it over
there if we walk around here we can get
up close
so that's the wire melting and the the
print head moving around so that's the
plasma discharge and it's it's hard to
tell but it's doing things at every
couple milliseconds it's actually
changing the electric wave form which is
how it's controlling the deposition so
well do you know the temperature of it
like is it just above meltdown system of
melting for aluminum yeah probably a few
hundred degrees above
the melting point of aluminum is 660
degrees celsius so the whole body of the
rocket is effectively melted together
one tiny bit at a time
all the raw metal for the whole the
whole rocket that's printed is this it's
a you know we kind of joke it's like
charlotte's web
like a spider silk but this is an
aluminum alloy
that's on a wire spool we actually print
about 10 inches a second so this wire is
really going super fast and then the
combination of lasers and plasma arc
discharge are working to melt both of
them together at the same time so where
does the wire come out so it's right
there
and then the electric arc discharge
happens right at the tip of the wire too
this is a camera that's a camera but why
would you want to 3d print a rocket
is it just because we can
it's funny to me that you had this
experience with 3d printing where you're
like oh 3d printing is clearly the
future whereas i feel like a lot of
people's experience with 3d printers as
mine has been it's like incredibly
frustrating i feel like 3d printing is
that thing that seems like it should be
great and yet whenever i try it
i don't get a result that i'm happy with
yeah i know i can tell you we had plenty
of experiences the first couple years
where we ended up with a pile of metal
and it didn't work
but there are actually good reasons to
3d print a rocket
a rocket has four major systems payload
guidance structural and propulsion the
bulk of the rocket is made up of the
propulsion system including the
propellant tanks and the rocket engines
cryogenic fuel and oxidizer are pumped
through an injector into the combustion
chamber where they react releasing an
enormous amount of heat this causes the
exhaust gases to expand exiting the
rocket nozzle at high velocity
the faster this exit velocity and the
higher the mass flow rate the more
thrust that can be generated
so rockets are huge complex engineering
projects which up to this point have
largely been manufactured using
traditional techniques that means before
you can build the rocket you first have
to build the tools to build the rocket
for example to build nasa's next huge
rocket the space launch system or sls
they first needed to construct the
vertical assembly center or vac
this is a 170 foot tall tool for welding
together the domes rings and barrel
sections of the rocket's fuel tanks
they built that like an aerospace thing
and they've had to spin up all these
custom tooling designs and validate that
those work before it actually starts
building the rocket
and they've finally got one being
assembled on the pad after 11 years of
development in contrast relativity space
the company is just five and a half
years old and they plan to launch their
first rocket this year
i see this as a like old engineering
style versus silicon valley style of
build something figure out what's wrong
with it and build another thing that
fixes those right the difference is i've
always done that with software
these guys are doing it with aerospace
hardware so this is the actual rocket
tank structure
of what we're going to be launching in
orbit at the end of this year so this
this actual thing is launched into space
that will go to space this will get a
space and it's by far the largest 3d
printed product really of any type ever
made that's going to fly i think maybe
of any type in the world but it still
looks 3d printed like you can still see
the layers yeah yeah you can still see
the layers it only adds an extra
uh five to ten percent of the mass with
the roughness when you actually cross
section the material and look at the
machine parts of it it looks like normal
metal like actually at this end this is
printed as well we just machine it
afterwards so it looks like normal metal
in the joint sections does the surface
roughness cause any aerodynamic problems
no none at all yeah it's actually the
exact same aerodynamically this whole
thing we simulate the print before
printing because if you just printed you
know the 3d file and said press print
you would end up with a printer that's
warped and like material falling all
over the place it wouldn't actually work
so we've invented software that reverse
warps the whole part before printing it
so the robots are actually doing this
really wobbly weird shape but then it
it's actually perfectly straight within
a human hair
at the entire length as well
the warpy thing turns into the
and we simulate all of that so it's a
big computational solver
that simulates it and there's there's
many many other problems we've had to
solve to actually get printing a rocket
to work but it's all these little pieces
over the last couple years
and we've really started to hit some
breakthroughs which is also why now you
see a whole a whole rocket yeah you can
step up here actually
yeah yeah
hello
i'm like looking inside a 3d printed
rocket that is actually going to go to
space yes
this giant hunk of metal it's
unbelievable yeah
there's uh like
rings inside those are printed in
stiffeners and so those help prevent the
rocket from buckling and crumpling so if
you had a coat can and didn't pop the
tab if you try to step on it it's almost
impossible because there's pressure
inside that that keeps it from buckling
but then when you pop the tab there's no
pressure and you can crunch it super
easy it's not hard at all so rockets are
the same the the 50 psi of pressure
which is you know about the same as a
car tire keeps it inflated and keeps it
from crumpling but then those stiffeners
also help keep it rigid yeah so believe
it or not a rocket tank is thinner
versus its diameter than a coke can so
when you look at a coat can you know how
big it is and then how fun it is a
rocket tank is actually thinner than
that so yeah it's pretty pretty light it
has to be very light sure
aerospace companies started using metal
3d printing over a decade ago to
construct small complex parts for
example the injector that is the most
important part of any rocket engine
where you're basically going to take the
liquid propellant
and turn it into a fine mist that mixes
really rapidly and those have actually
been transitioned to 3d printing all
over the industry
traditionally something like this it's a
rocket engine injector so it mixes
liquid oxygen and liquid methane
propellants together and this is what
actually produces all the fire and flame
that is in a rocket engine traditionally
it would be over a thousand individual
pieces and it would take nine months but
here we're 3d printing the whole thing
in one piece it takes two weeks and it
costs 10 times less one of the big
benefits of 3d printing is reducing the
number of parts have you ever thought
about how inside a rocket's combustion
chamber it gets really hot up to
3500 kelvin that's hot enough to melt
virtually any metal
so how do the combustion chamber and
rocket nozzle not melt well the answer
is they're cooled by passing the
cryogenic propellants over them
on the space shuttle main engines i love
to talk about them because inside those
engines it's hot enough to boil iron on
the outside you can freeze stuff to the
exterior of this because you're running
liquids a hydrogen through these things
but to make those you basically had to
take
thousands of very small pipes and then
you would form them into the shape of
the combustion chamber and the nozzle
and then you would braise weld them
together and this was a ridiculously
labor-intensive task you would have 1080
individual pipes running up the side all
having to be welded together to make the
combustion chamber and the nozzle on the
space shuttle engines so you can
actually 3d print these things
this is a rocket nozzle being 3d printed
and you can see the channels for the
cryogenic propellants being printed
right into the single part instead of
having to add a thousand pipes on the
outside smaller parts like these are
typically 3d printed using metal powder
and lasers so you can see the cooling
channels are all being built as the one
piece
so this is a nozzle it really just lays
down a layer of powder that's about a
20th the thickness of a human hair so
it's really really fine layers
just over and over and over and over
relentlessly for probably about a week
or so and then out comes a rocket nozzle
all printed as one piece it's way
cheaper than traditional and this has
four lasers going at once that's amazing
i get asked a lot well aren't 3d printed
metals not very strong or how can it
actually work but the printed materials
are stronger than they would be built
traditionally actually it's
counter-intuitive it is because we
develop our own custom alloys in-house
we have a whole material science team
just developing our own alloys for 3d
printing and the fact that it melts and
then cools and solidifies very very
quickly you can take advantage of that
that physics principle to get really
strong alloys
another major benefit of 3d printing is
that it allows for rapid iteration you
can build a part quickly test it and
then redesign rapidly in print again
so this is a version of the engine
that's about three years old at this
point but what's amazing is when you
actually look at the engine design today
it looks entirely different than this so
each version we build we can iterate and
make better so that's the other
you know and we say software driven
manufacturing that's really what it is
since you don't have fixed tool lane all
the part geometries are just controlled
via the cad model and then the printers
just print you know direct from file
essentially it means you can actually
change the design extremely fast so
building a whole engine only takes us
about a month so then a month later you
can do a better version and a month
later a better version than that
so this particular one will actually be
i believe one of the first flight
engines that's actually launching to
orbit on our first rocket so this tubing
not 3d printed right not today okay and
the future versions we're actually you
know integrating that into the printed
housings and we're gonna have a way that
that's all printed too perhaps the
biggest impact of the 3d printing
approach could be to totally transform
what a rocket looks like with 3d
printing engineers can build parts that
would be impractical or impossible with
traditional techniques smooth curvy
bio-inspired designs are just as easy to
print as ordinary structures this is
actually part of our next rocket uh
taran r so it's even larger this is like
the base of a tank yeah yeah so it's
gonna go out it's it's almost done
printing it's gonna go out about to here
so it's 16 foot diameter but it's almost
like a shell
i was going to say like this reminds me
of suddenly we're in the little mermaid
or something yeah yeah
yeah it's just for stiffness though it's
not that you plan to make it
bio-inspired it's that like that
structure is actually the optimal
structure yeah
we're actually designing many features
in the rocket that could not be
manufactured unless it was 3d printed
which is one of the the secret sauces of
why you had to build a whole company
around it is because our rocket actually
looks entirely different 3d printed than
it does traditionally like in my mind
it's been more akin to like gas internal
combustion engine to electric
you know really people are trying to put
batteries and electric motors into
existing products for decades like
everyone knew electric vehicles were the
future but
nissan and ford had really not
compelling products for a long time it
wasn't until a company came along you
know called tesla that decided well
actually the shift to electrification
means the batteries the electric motors
the factory the design of the product
how we're actually going to scale the
company the supply chain all of it's
different because of electrification i
mean that's in some ways the dirty
secret of electric cars and why they're
able to be automated in production
because the part count is so much lower
so for a fully 3d printed rocket we have
a hundred times fewer parts which is
what we're guiding to there's no fixed
tooling in our factory at all
unlike the rest of aerospace that's
still really 60 years later even since
apollo building products one at a time
by hand with hundreds of thousands to
millions of individual parts and no
one's really changed that paradigm of
how an aerospace factory actually
fundamentally works
yeah this is the new
fully 3d printed rocket
so yeah we'll have dragonfly wing type
structures and we're building it so but
that's the first one and then that's
that one for scale
so yeah it is definitely definitely
bigger yeah so our our rocket is named
taran 1 and taran r and then our 3d
printers target so all the things that
relativity are named after starcraft
so yeah of course the the stargate
printer was what the protoss used to
warp in spaceships and so that's what's
warping in spaceships at relativity
we have a system in our avionics called
a pylon that we have to build a lot of
so we always joke we have to construct
additional pylons
most people don't know how rockets built
traditionally at all anyway and i think
a lot of people assume it's rockets so
shouldn't it be already very advanced
and robots everywhere and you know
elon's got spacex and tesla so doesn't
spacex just look like tesla with all
these robots and automation
but that's really not true i mean
aerospace hasn't adopted automation at
all one of the issues right is that
you're not making a lot of rockets right
so there's no
you know incentive to like figure out
how to tool up a factory to like pump
out rockets like 100 a day or something
exactly like you would for cars exactly
you're not making a lot even with
commercial aircraft you're not making
nearly as many and there's orders of
magnitude more parts and complexity a
commercial aircraft usually has several
million individual parts so to have
robots assemble several million parts
when a automobile has tens of thousands
is completely different it's a much
harder problem so that's where 3d
printing is automation for aerospace
because you're not assembling all those
parts with robots like you would with a
car you're assembling them in the 3d
file and then the printer just prints
them assembled
the plan for relativity space yeah is it
low earth orbit or is it going further
than that so for terran one it's mostly
low earth orbit the first rocket taran r
can actually send payload to the moon to
mars i mean it's pretty pretty huge i
founded the company because i really
thought that there needed to be you know
dozens and hundreds of companies making
mars happen we're focused on taking this
3d printing tech and what we call the
factory of the future
and one day shrinking it down to
something we'll actually launch to mars
and build an industrial base so that's
the long-term vision of the company is
build the industrial base on mars in
many ways this factory is just a
prototype it's still far smaller than a
traditional factory it's far lighter and
i think it's inevitable someone has to
build this company i don't know that in
10 20 years that you will be 3d printing
rockets all the time because if you are
flying lots of rockets it becomes
cheaper to have a dedicated machine for
it i do think that as a company
they are well placed because even if
terran fails to capitalize on the market
even if nobody wants to use it as a
launch vehicle
they are clearly now the world experts
on 3d printing rocket hardware because
they've done everything right they've
tried to apply 3d printing to places
where a lot of people dismissed it so i
think they're sort of secure as a
company
whether we will see rockets being 3d
printed all the time
that's a good question
there's been a lot of talk recently
about billionaires going to space
yeah
will a 3d printed rocket make it
possible and a lot cheaper for
me to go to space uh yes i mean
certainly what we're doing is lowering
the cost so our rockets um are costing
about five times to you know i believe
we can get to 10 or even 100 times
cheaper with a fully reusable rocket
than what we have today
so it can definitely climb down the cost
curve but i also think you know going to
mars and the first people that are going
it really is about what what is the
point of being a human being like for me
why go to mars is if we were having this
conversation and a million people were
living on another planet i think 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 and there'd be
long distance amelie like love story
like i think there's just a lot of
richness in what human culture and
society can be about yes i think there's
criticism about you know billionaires
going to space and and i don't agree
with you know all all of the projects
need to actually add up to some vision
that is meaningful i think that's really
important but i do think going to mars
is really just about
you know we've lived for generations on
earth so what's it all about like why
why do we want to keep improving and
getting better and
furthering society on earth so for me
it's pretty existential what it means to
be a human being
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