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3D Printed Rockets

lpetrich

lpetrich

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Relativity Space - an entirely 3D-printed rocket. Not just a rocket engine, but an entire rocket.

World’s largest 3D metal printers - rockets built and flown in days
Relativity's proprietary Factory of the Future centers on Stargate, the world’s largest metal 3D printers, that create Terran 1, the world’s first 3D printed rocket, and the first fully reusable, entirely 3D printed rocket, Terran R, from raw material to flight in 60 days. Relativity’s Stargate printers’ patented technology enables an entirely new value chain and innovative structural designs that make Terran 1 and Terran R possible. By developing its Factory of the Future and rockets together, Relativity accelerates its ability to improve design, production, quality, and speed.

Zero fixed tooling and radical part count reduction
  • Faster design iterations and part optimizations
  • Real-time quality control and part inspection
  • Sensor and analytics-driven machine learning
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 3D printing or "additive manufacturing" is construction of objects bit by bit from a computer-software model. The raw material may be a liquid, a plastic, or a powder. It is then solidified, or else melted then solidified, or else sintered (fusing powder together with heat). Not only plastics and similar materials can be 3D printed, but also metals and ceramics.

Some traditional techniques are "subtractive manufacturing", like cutting and abrading (using sandpaper and the like).

3D printing has emerged as a cost-effective alternative to traditional techniques for special orders and small runs. It can be used with subtractive techniques for final shaping. It may even be used to make originals for molding and stamping and the like.
 
I will be very curious to see how 'reusable' these are in the long run. Additive manufacturing is still in its relative infancy, and there are a lot of known issues with fatigue in 3D printed parts. They are comparable to castings (unless the tech/process has drastically improved) which is about the worst manufacturing process for getting good fatigue properties.
 
Metal fatigue:
 Fatigue (material)
n materials science, fatigue is the initiation and propagation of cracks in a material due to cyclic loading. Once a fatigue crack has initiated, it grows a small amount with each loading cycle, typically producing striations on some parts of the fracture surface. The crack will continue to grow until it reaches a critical size, which occurs when the stress intensity factor of the crack exceeds the fracture toughness of the material, producing rapid propagation and typically complete fracture of the structure.

Fatigue has traditionally been associated with the failure of metal components which led to the term metal fatigue
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 Fatigue testing and  Fractography

A way of making a material more resistant to fatigue is annealing - heating it up then letting it slowly cool down. When heated, the material becomes a little bit soft, and when that happens, it can smooth out irregularities that can make cracks.
 
What they are hoping to launch:

Terran 1: the first entirely 3D-printed rocket
As a next generation launch vehicle, Terran 1 is designed for the future of constellation deployment and resupply. Its groundbreaking, unique and software-driven architecture is capable of accommodating satellite customers’ evolving needs, while also providing the most agile and affordable launch service on the market. Designed and printed in the USA, Terran 1 is the most innovative product to emerge from the aerospace manufacturing industry since the dawn of privatization of space 20 years ago.
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Expected performance:

  • 1,250 KG TO 185 KM LEO - Low Earth Orbit
  • 900 KG TO 500 KM SSO - Sun-synchronous orbit
  • 700 KG TO 1200 KM SSO - Sun-synchronous orbit
SSO? For an orbit that will keep its orientation relative to the Sun. That is done by using the precession of the orbit caused by the Earth's equatorial bulge. That precession is in the opposite direction from the satellite's orbit, so the satellite is put into a slightly retrograde orbit.

The diagram of the payload fairing shows a picture of a two-door car overlaid on it.

The rocket will be a two-stage one, with the first stage having 9 Aeon engines and the second stage 1 Aeon vacuum-capable engine.
 
The company has gotten into Wikipedia:  Relativity Space
Launch plans - "Our launch window opens at 1300ET on March 8, 2023."

The rockets
  •  Terran 1 -- ht 35.2 m, dia 2.3 m -- 1st: 9 Aeon 1 (later 1 Aeon R), 2nd: 1 Aeon Vac -- 1.5 mt to LEO
  •  Terran R -- ht 66 m, dia 5.5 m -- 1st: 7 Aeon R, 2nd:1 Aeon Vac -- 20 mt to LEO
Terran R is intended to be fully reusable: the first stage, the second stage, and the payload fairing. I think it likely that they will succeed with the first stages, given SpaceX's success with its first stages. The second stage and fairing are more iffy, since they are jettisoned later in flight.

LEO: Low Earth Orbit, about 300 km

The engines:
  • Aeon 1 -- propellant CH4 - O2 -- thrust 100 kN
  • Aeon Vac -- propellant CH4 - O2 -- thrust 126 kN
  • Aeon R -- propellant CH4 - O2 -- thrust 1,300 kN
I'm not sure what engineering reason that the engine's designers had for choosing methane.
  • Kerosene (aviation grade): mp 226 K (-47 C) -- 9.72 MJ/kg
  • Methane: mp 90.694 K, bp 111.6 K -- 11.1 MJ/kg
  • Hydrogen: mp 13.99 K, bp 20.271 K -- 15.9 MJ/kg
  • Oxygen: mp 54.36 K, bp 90.188 K
(at 1 atm pressure)

Methane and oxygen are liquid over similar temperature ranges, which may be a plus for CH4. It is also cryogenic, but oxygen-level cryogenic, not hydrogen-level cryogenic.

Sizes:
 
noting

From Forbes:
And in the U.S., young rocket engine maker Ursa Major is taking orders now for its new Arroway propulsion engine designed to displace the now-unavailable Russian-made propulsion sources. It’s also 3D printed using available metal 3D printers.

“I don’t think our company would exist without 3D printing,” says Jake Bowles, director of advanced manufacturing and materials at Ursa Major, who spent five years at SpaceX. “Our evolution was strongly tied to the existence and the maturity of 3D printing.”
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They expect to bring out their engines in months, not users. From UM's site:
  • Hadley - kerosene, O2 - 5,000 lbf / 22 kN
  • Ripley - kerosene, O2 - 50,000 lbf / 220 kN
  • Arroway - CH4, O2 - 200,000 lbf / 890 kN
Of these, Hadley is in production. All three are intended to be reusable. Arroway is roughly comparable to the SpaceX Merlin engine, used in the Falcon 9 rocket: 854 kN sea level, 981 kN vacuum.

Names? I can't place Hadley, but Ripley is from the Alien series, and Arroway from Carl Sagan's Contact.
 
Rockets have a danger of exploding, and rocket engineers have a euphemism for that: "'rapid unscheduled disassembly'" or RUD -- This is what a 'rapid unscheduled disassembly' looks like | SpaceX | The Guardian

Back to 3D printing of rocket engines.

From Orbex's site:
We use a wide range of advanced materials and techniques to create each launch vehicle, including the use of additive manufacturing for the majority of the propulsion subsystem and carbon fibre / graphene composites for the main structures and tanks.
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From theconversation.com
Rocket engines generate the energy equivalent of detonating a tonne of TNT every second, directing that energy into an exhaust that reaches temperatures well over 3,000℃. Those engines that manage this without rapidly dissembling in an unscheduled fashion take at least three years to engineer from scratch, most of which is taken up by the cyclical process of redesign, rebuild, refire and repeat.

That’s because rocket engines are incredibly complex. The Saturn V’s F-1 engines that blasted Neil Armstrong towards the Moon in 1969 each had 5,600 manufactured parts. Many of them were sourced from different suppliers and had to be individually welded or bolted together by hand, which took time.
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How they do it:
... Increasingly, engineers are favouring a process called selective laser sintering to 3D-print rocket engine parts in an additive process. It works by first laying down a layer of metal powder, before melting shapes into the powder with lasers. The metal binds where it’s melted, and remains powder where it’s not. Once the shape has cooled, another layer of powder is added, and the part is built up layer by layer. For rocket engines, an Inconel copper super alloy powder is used, because it can withstand very high temperatures.
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One can make a new part in a few days, so if something goes wrong, it will be easy to deliver new parts with possible fixes and try again.
Using 3D printing also helps manufacturers reduce the weight of the complete rocket, as fewer nuts, bolts and welds are required to produce their complex structure. 3D printing is especially useful in manufacturing an engine’s complex regeneratively cooled nozzle, which routes cool fuel around the hot engine to simultaneously cool the engine walls and preheat the cold fuel before combustion.
[/quoe]
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How NASA brought the monstrous F-1 “moon rocket” engine back to life | Ars Technica - 4/14/2013
noting
New F-1B rocket engine upgrades Apollo-era design with 1.8M lbs of thrust | Ars Technica - 4/14/2013
and stating
The main combustion chamber and nozzle in particular will undergo tremendous simplification and consolidating; the parts count for those two assemblies together will be reduced from 5,600 manufactured elements in the original F-1 down to just 40.
Click to expand...
Back to theconversation.com
Virtually all new rocket companies and space startups are adopting 3D metal-printing technology. It accelerates their development phase, helping them survive the crucial years before they manage to get anything into space.
Click to expand...
Noting
Rocket Lab has done 33 launches of its Electron rocket, with a LEO payload capacity of 300 kg. In 2024, it will launch its Neutron rocket, with a LEO capacity of 8 mt. Rocket Lab's site brags about how quickly Rocket Lab's rockets can launch a spare satellite to replace a malfunctioning one.
 
Additive Manufacturing for the Aerospace Industry | ScienceDirect - a book on that

 3D-printed spacecraft
In June 2014, Aerojet Rocketdyne (AJR) announced that they had "manufactured and successfully tested an engine which had been entirely 3D printed." The Baby Banton engine is a 22 kN (5,000 lbf) thrust engine that runs on LOX/kerosene propellant.[6] By March 2015, AJR had completed a series of hot-fire tests for additively manufactured components for its full-size AR-1 booster engine.[7]

The new United Launch Alliance Vulcan launch vehicle—with first launch no earlier than 2019—is evaluating 3D printing for over 150 parts: 100 polymer and more than 50 metal parts.[8]

By 2017, a 3D printed rocket engine had successfully launched a rocket to space, when on 25 May 2017 an Electron rocket launched to space from New Zealand that was the first to be powered by a main stage rocket "engine made almost entirely using 3D printing."[3] The Electron's first successful orbital launch was on 21 January 2018.[4]
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The main application so far has been in rocket engines. Relativity Space is unusual in printing the whole rocket.
The SuperDraco engine that provides launch escape system and propulsive-landing thrust for the Dragon V2 passenger-carrying space capsule is fully printed, and was the first fully printed rocket engine. ...

The ability to 3D print the complex parts was key to achieving the low-mass objective of the engine. It is a very complex engine, and it was very difficult to form all the cooling channels, the injector head, and the throttling mechanism. ... [The ability] "to print very high strength advanced alloys ... was crucial to being able to create the SuperDraco engine."
Click to expand...

That article does not look very up to date, however.
 
I watched it.

Terran 1: Launching The World’s First 3D Printed Rocket (Pt. 3) - YouTube - the first two parts: two previous attempts to launch their rocket, which were both scrubbed.

They launched their rocket, and the first stage performed well. But the second-stage engine did not start successfully. The rocket was traveling at 7,000 km/h when that happened, about 1/4 of orbital velocity: 28,000 km/h. So it was far short of going into orbit.

Relativity Space on Twitter: "Today’s launch proved Relativity’s 3D-printed rocket technologies that will enable our next vehicle, Terran R. We successfully made it through Max-Q, the highest stress state on our printed structures. This is the biggest proof point for our novel additive manufacturing approach.… (pix link)" / Twitter
 
FAILURE: Relativity Terran 1 Test Flight : CCSFS SLC-16 : 23 Mar 2023 03:25 UTC

Relativity Space on Twitter: "🧵“Good Luck, Have Fun” First Flight update. (pix link)" / Twitter
Followed by some other tweets with picture links.

The first stage performed perfectly, and stage separation also did so. But the second-stage engine had some problems: its valves did not open quickly enough, and while its fuel pump started, its oxygen pump didn't.

But other second-stage functions worked, like engine gimbaling, and the second stage coasted to a maximum altitude of 134 kilometers.

FAILURE: Relativity Terran 1 Test Flight : CCSFS SLC-16 : 23 Mar 2023 03:25 UTC -- someone OCRed the text from the included images in RS's Twitter thread.

Relativity Space on Twitter: "Terran R newly released product update: the next-gen reusable 3D printed rocket. ..." / Twitter
 
I neglected to go into detail.
Relativity Space on Twitter: "Terran R newly released product update: the next-gen reusable 3D printed rocket. ..." / Twitter
Terran R newly released product update: the next-gen reusable 3D printed rocket. 🚀

💫 Two-stage, 270-foot-tall rocket with an 18-foot diameter
💫 5-meter payload fairing, sending payloads into LEO, MEO, GEO, and beyond
💫23,500 kg to Low Earth Orbit (LEO), downrange landing
💫5,500 kg to a Geosynchronous Transfer Orbit (GTO), downrange landing
💫33,500 kg max payload to LEO, expendable configuration

#TerranR

Powered by Aeon R. Designed and manufactured in-house. Propelled by LOx + LNG.

✔ 13x 3D-printed Aeon R rocket engines on stage 1
✔ Aeon R Sea level thrust of 258,000 lbf, combined vehicle liftoff thrust of 3,354,000 lbf
✔1x 3D-printed Aeon Vac engine on stage 2 with a vacuum thrust of 279,000 lbf
✔ High pressure gas generator cycle

Terran R infrastructure from coast to coast.

✔ Produced in Long Beach, CA
✔Tested at @NASAStennis

✔Launched from Launch Complex 16, Cape Canaveral, FL
⛵ Shipped by sea through the Panama Canal to Mississippi for testing and then Florida for launch.

Get up to speed on the latest behind Terran R: https://relativityspace.com/terran-r
Click to expand...
 
Relativity Space on Twitter: "Designed for rapid reusability ..." / Twitter
Designed for rapid reusability #TerranR builds off of Terran 1’s foundation.

🔑 High performance, 3D printed, LOx/methane propulsion systems using a GG combustion cycle
🔑 Ascent launch vehicle complexity & dev sophistication relevant to a larger program ➡️ Terran R
🔑 Primary 3D printed structures and integrated structures designed for dozens of cycles

More behind Terran R: https://relativityspace.com/terran-r
Click to expand...
Relativity Space - Terran R
Expected performance:
  • 23,500 kg to Low Earth Orbit (LEO), downrange landing
  • 5,500 kg to a Geosynchronous Transfer Orbit (GTO), downrange landing
  • 33,500 kg max payload to LEO, expendable configuration
Click to expand...
Relativity Space Shares Updated Go-to-Market Approach for Terran R, Taking Aim at Medium to Heavy Payload Category with Next-Generation Rocket
Starting in 2026, Terran R will launch from Space Launch Complex 16, the company’s orbital launch site at Cape Canaveral, Florida.

Designed for rapid reusability and development iteration speed, Terran R is a 3D printed rocket, with initial versions using aluminum alloy tank straight-section barrels in a hybrid manufacturing approach, ... Each Terran R requires approximately 6 times more 3D printing by mass than Terran 1. 3D printing technology for Terran R is strategically used to reduce vehicle complexity and improve manufacturability, with continued company focus on redefining what is possible with large scale additive manufacturing after successfully proving the viability of 3D printed rockets with Terran 1.
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Seems like RS is retreating from trying to 3D-print everything, by using sheets rolled into tubes for the rocket sides.
 
 Terran 1 and  Terran R

An obvious comparison is with SpaceX's rockets:  Comparison of orbital launch systems

Thrust of each stage (1st: sea level, 2nd: vecuum), what it can get into orbit. In () is the number of engines if greater than 1
  •  Falcon 1 -- 450 kN -- 31 kN -- LEO: 670 kg
  •  Falcon 9 v1.0 -- (9) 4,940 kN -- 445 kN -- LEO: 9,000 kg, GTO: 3,400 kg
  •  Falcon 9 v1.1 -- (9) 5,885 kN -- 716 kN -- LEO: 13,150 kg, GTO: 4,850 kg
  •  Falcon 9 Full Thrust -- (9) 7,607 kN -- 934 kN -- LEO: exp 22,800 kg, reu 17,400 kg, GTO: exp 8,300 kg, reu 5,500 kg, Mars 4,020 kg
  •  Falcon Heavy -- (27) 22,800 kN -- 934 kN -- LEO: 63,800 kg, GTO: 26,700 kg, Mars: 16,600 kg, Pluto: 3,500 kg
  •  SpaceX Starship -- (33) 74,500 kN -- (6) 14,700 kN -- LEO: 150,000 kg

Relativity Space:
  •  Terran 1 -- (9) 920 kN -- 126 kN -- LEO: 1,479 kg
  •  Terran R -- (13) 14,900 kN -- 1,240 kN -- LEO: 33,500 kg
So the Terran R will be halfway between Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy

Most powerful rockets ever built by NASA and the Soviet Union:
  •  Saturn V -- (5) 34.500 kN -- (5) 4,400 kN -- 890 kN -- LEO: 140,000 kg, TLI: 43,500 kg
  •  Space Shuttle -- (2+3) 30,255 kN -- LEO: 78,000 kg (orbiter) + 27,500 kg = 105,500 kg
  •  Space Launch System -- (2+4) 39,000 kN -- LEO: 95,000 kg, TLI: 27,000 kg
  •  N1 (rocket) -- (30) 45,400 kN -- (8) 14,040 kN -- (4) 1,610 kN -- LEO: 95,000 kg, TLI: 23,500 kg
  •  Energia (rocket) -- (4+4) 34,800 kN -- LEO: 100,000 kg, TLI: 32,000 kg

LEO = Low Earth orbit
GTO = Geosynchronous transfer orbit
TLI = Translunar injection
reu = reusable mode (first stage recovered)
exp = expendable mode
 
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