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A $500,000 check from billionaire Mark Cuban changes the life of a former employee of Jeff Bezos

Tim Ellis is building a company that could become a formidable competitor to SpaceX. Photo: TechCrunch

Seven years ago, Tim Ellis sent investor Mark Cuban an email that changed the life of the 31-year-old engineer.

Ellis used to work at Jeff Bezos’ spaceflight company Blue Origin and dreamed of starting a company of his own that could compete with Blue Origin. The email Ellis sent to Mark Cuban describes a fascinating universe and talks about the idea of ​​​​producing 3D printed rockets.

That approach worked almost immediately. “Minutes after sending this email to Mark Cuban, I received an investment commitment of half a million dollars,” Ellis recalls.

That money helped raise Relativity Space’s valuation to $4.2 billion, and also funded Relativity Space’s goal of 3D-printed rocket production to compete in the private spaceflight industry. core. This is an industry that is predicted to be worth more than $1 trillion by the end of this decade. Tim Ellis is the co-founder and CEO of Relativity Space. In just a few months, the company will launch the world’s first 3D printed rocket into space. In their journey to building a startup, Ellis and cofounder Jordan Noone – who interned with Ellis at Blue Origin before taking a job as an engineer at SpaceX – have raised more than $1.3 billion from investors. like BlackRock and Tiger Global.

Ellis’ interest in rockets began very early on. After attending the University of Southern California’s Rocket Propulsion Laboratory and interning at Blue Origin for three consecutive summers, Ellis landed a job as a full-time engineer at Bezos’ company.

At Blue Origin, Ellis was in charge of 3D printing individual rocket parts and was intrigued by the idea of ​​using a large 3D printer to create the entire rocket. It could reduce costs, he argues, and potentially even pave the way for the kind of multi-planetary society that SpaceX CEO Elon Musk often discusses.

“I realized, for that future to happen, someone would have to start a company that would be able to base it somewhere on Mars,” says Ellis. you can use rockets to launch to another planet. A factory that can make a variety of products with minimal human involvement.”

Ellis realized that anyone could do what he was doing now. The two co-founders of Relativity Space say they’ve built the world’s largest metal 3D printer, the 7.3m-tall Stargate – and used it to build the first 3D printed rocket, called the Terran 1 In an interview with Florida Today Last month, Ellis said Terran 1 is expected to make its first space flight later this year.

“I realize now that a lot of the things I took for pleasure growing up – whether it was the topics I researched, following stories, learning things with curiosity and always figuring out how to put all the information together – all of which has allowed me to scale and run Relativity as it is today.


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