Pushkin. Tim Ellis builds rockets for a living. He started his career at Blue Origin, the rocket company founded by Jeff Bezos, and then in twenty fifteen he left to start his own rocket company. The company is called Relativity Space, and last year they launched their first rocket. The launch did not go exactly as planned.
Launch day.
A lot of emotions certainly come up thinking about it.
There's really no way to describe it.
It was actually a new emotion I don't think I've felt in my entire life.
I'm Jacob Goldstein and this is What's Your Problem? The show where I talk to people who are trying to make technological progress. Tim Ellis is really working on a couple of problems. He's working on a short term problem, which is how can you use three D printing to make rockets more cheaply and quickly? And then he's working on a long term problem, which is how can three
D printing help humans colonize Mars? Trying not to start with the email to Mark Cuban, but I can't, so tell me about your email to Mark Cuban.
I really was convinced that three D printing was going to be a highly disruptive technology and wanted to go try to print a whole rocket, but we didn't really have anything At the time I emailed to Mark Cuban, I actually had not even emailed anybody else with a relativity space email address. That actually was the first email I ever since. So I created the relativity Space email address to email Mark Cuban. That the idea really came.
I mean, I am from Plano, Texas. It's a suburb more at the Dallas so I certainly grew up hearing a lot about Mark Cuban with Dallas Mavericks. And I had a friend at USC in Los Angeles, where I went to college, that was an entrepreneur, and I remember he had a blog where I think at one point he just said, you know, Mark Cuban does actually answer cold email. So it sort of heard about this, you know,
phenomenon from that. So I thought, well, you know, I don't know any investors, actually don't really know anything about starting the company, but I know I need to raise money. I didn't know how to do it, so I just thought, well, I'm going to try emailing Mark Cuban and let's see if it works. So I didn't have his email address, So I had to guess twenty different versions of his email address, you know, Mark at Dallasmavericks dot com, Mark dot Cuban at Dallas Mavericks dot com, you know mcuban
at Dallas Mavericks. And then I did Gmail. Does anybody have Hotmail or Yahoo anymore?
I mean, let's be my mom does, but let's be honest.
So it would be amazing if Mark Cuban, Yeah, Mark Cuban heady.
Yeah.
So so you guess all these email addresses.
And then you know, from there, I knew he's a busy guy, so I couldn't write a lot of words, and so I just explained, you know, I'm from Plano, Texas, like so I led with that, and then you know, quickly talked about that I worked with Jeff Bezos personally, which is true for the three D printing projects, so kind of getting him hooked, making him realize I'm not so far away from him, and then showing credibility and legitimacy,
especially because I was only twenty five. But he replied back in five minutes and then said, well, what do you want from me? And so it quickly got into the ask and then you know that almost felt like being on Shark Tank, I guess virtually. But yeah, you know, we said we were raising half a million dollars. Even that amount was a little bit pulled out of thin air because again we kind of just started the company and not even really started yet, like we hadn't even incorporated yet.
It really was the first team all we sent.
So yeah, I asked him for one hundred thousand dollars of a half a million dollar funding rounds, and then you know, he replied back almost immediately again asking you know, why does melon do this? Had a you know, kind of straightforward answered like he's just focused on other things and this is complimentary.
And then he.
Wrote back, We'll just do the full half a million dollars, like he just gave us the whole five hundred k. We've now done six funding rounds, we've raised one point three three billion dollars, and he's invested in every single one.
Were you surprised by his reply when he said he'd give you five hundred dollars?
Yeah, hell, yeah, of course, yes absolutely. I Mean I now know just how hard fundraising is, and it's a complete an omelet.
So at that time, you're starting this company, like, what's your dream?
So we wrote on the back of a Starbucks napkin all or Starbucks receipts, I guess, really kind of showing the relationship between three D printing a rocket and then one day, how we see this technology helping build an industrial base on Mars. So I thought, you know, really a lot of the inspiration behind starting Relativity space came from this realization that SpaceX had landed rockets and docked with the International Space Station. They were a thirteen year
old company. It was super exciting to watch what they had done, even when I was at Blue Origin. But despite this once in a generation's success, they're still the only company in the world that wanted to make humanity multiplanetary and put a million people on Mars. So I thought it was inevitable there has to be a second. Clearly, if we're going to put a million people on Mars, there will be you know, dozens to hundreds.
Of companies that make this happen.
So I thought, heck, we could be the like, we are going to be the second company to go try to put a million people on Mars too, because there's clearly going to have to be a person that builds the company that builds all the industrial base equipment, you know, initially maybe spare parts and other things. So yeah, we could we could be those founders, and that was something that resonated a lot with me, and it's still true today.
So if the dream is to put a million people on Mars, when you're starting, what's the what's the how you get there?
Point?
Yeah, Like, what are you actually setting out to do in practical terms to achieve that?
Of course?
So you know, really the first major goal, which has now become Chapter one of Relativity, which we actually just completed, was to three D print an entire rocket, and then the second big piece was to develop the world's largest metal three D printer.
So tell me about the sort of three D printing dream you know, when you're starting out, what's yeah, why why is three D printing sort of the core kind of technical piece or manufacturing piece that you're focused on.
Early on, Really, what we thought was three D printing was more of an automation technology, and this was the kind of uns the thing, and I was certainly a user of the technology. By the way, like all of the parts and products I designed, a blue egin used
off the shelf metal three D printers. So and that's why I started the three D printing division there, because I really, for myself saw firsthand just how great it was to design products that would normally be twenty different parts and you could print them as one piece and so then you only had to print a single piece, and it was a lot faster and cheaper, and it still functioned basically the same, but the key thing is
it looked super different. So in order to combine twenty parts together and print them, you don't just take an existing product and press print. It really has to be
designed from the very beginning for this technology. And I think that was the key thing that made me realize we had to start our own company because a printed rocket and all the way you test it, qualify it, make sure it actually works the material science, like so many pieces needed to be developed from scratch to make a whole printed rocket happen.
You can't just say, yeah, let's make rocket the way we're making it, but instead of using machined parts, let's three D print them. Like that's not the way it works. You have to sort of re engineer the rocket from the ground exactly when you're starting the company, what's your thesis simply for why a three D printed rocket would be better than a traditionally manufactured rocket.
A three D printed rocket, the thesis really was, we can reduce the part count by two orders of magnitude, so one hundred times fewer parts. That really comes from part count consolidation, and you print them together as single pieces.
We believed we could build a rocket very quickly.
So initially the tagline was building a rocket in sixty days and this sixty days later we could build another version, and sixty days after that another version. So this is the north star of where we see the tech getting to and then the others cost So clearly all of those those two things really help us reduce the cost
of launch, and that that was really it. I mean, at the end of the day, people that are building satellites and need rocket launches, which is our primary business model, just want something that's reliable, It can actually launch their payload and has enough payload capacity, it's cheap, and it shows up on time. It's a pretty sure.
They don't care how it's built right, It doesn't matter to them. They just wanted to go to space and not blow up and.
Be cheap yep.
So it's as you said, going on eight years ago that you started the company. I know you had your first launch earlier this year. So just to jump to the moment, like just before that launch, tell me about what you had built. Tell me about the factory and about the three D printers.
Sure to the metal printer's relativity is built. Are the largest in the world. We had several generations in our factory. When you walk into them, it looks like Westworld a bit. So there's a big robotic arm, six axis industrial robotic arm. There's a print head at the end of it. That print head deposits metal and uses it was lasers at
the time, but it's also plasma arc energy. So you basically, you know, using electricity, melt the wire and wherever the robot our moves, you just deposit molten metal and it solidifies. There's a whole of course control system. There's a bunch of sensors that are constantly monitoring this.
How big is it.
It's about thirty five feet tall. For the latest versions can print up to eighteen feet diameter.
It's huge.
Can print a rocket basically, I mean eighteen feet diameters like the tube of the rocket.
Yes, I mean eighteen feet is the diameter of our next reusable vehicle, which is three point thirty million pounds of thrust.
So one big yeah diameter, the big one.
But they also built the ones that we launched, which is seven and a half feet wide. We had quite a few of these printers, so it really just looked like a field of robot arms, you know, melting metal and in a very precise way, very controlled, very high quality. It was actually quite a quiet factory because of this. You know, there really was not a lot of uh sound, the hustle and bustle. Certainly, that's very high energy. When you walk in a rocket factory that's actively building a rocket.
You know, there's there's.
A lot of people around, but overall less than you would normally have. And uh, you know, certainly something that looks like the future. There's no question about that. This looks like the future.
So is there an example of a thing that initially didn't work, didn't work the way you thought it was going to work, and you had to figure out a different way to make it work.
Yeah, Well one was you know, of course, in rocket engine development, you blow up rocket engines in fact, I actually encouraged the team to push hard enough to blowing up at some point.
You don't like.
If you're if you're not blowing them up, you're you're not really testing them exactly exactly.
Now, you don't want to blow up the test stand because that tends to tends to be a.
Much right amount of blowing up.
Yeah, it's a slower, slower recovery, but blowing up a rocket engine, now, Yeah, there's different failure modes. Some are more catastrophic than others. We were actually fairly lucky. We didn't have any that were insanely bad. We had one that was, you know, kind of kind of rough, really early in the program. I think it was our fourth ever chamber tests. We were a tiny, tiny company that
particular one. So I remember watching the flame down in the flame trench slowly creep up, a little drip of methane that was still still kind of dripping from the engine at the end of the test, and you.
Just fuse almost yeah.
Almost almost, and you just watch this flame, you know, in the slow mode video, creep up, creep up, and then right when it goes in the engine chamber, it was just like a bomb, just went off. Now, of course nobody was hurt. Everything was safe. We got to give those caveats, but it was Yeah, it's pretty crazy video. But it took a few months to go fix that
and to figure it out. So we're lucky at the time we had three engine tests that had been successful before that, so we knew it wasn't a fundamental problem. It was something we could fix. I think if you blow up your very first engine, that can be kind of hard because then you don't know exactly does it fundamentally work or not.
So tell me about launch day. Right, this was whatever seven ish years after you launched the company. You're ready to launch the first rocket. Tell me about that day.
Launch day.
A lot of emotions certainly come up thinking about it. There's really no way to describe it. It was actually a new emotion. I don't think I've felt in my entire life. It was at night, so we had to launch at night due to the air traffic kind of coordination. It was around spring break, so we wanted to be a good kind of airspace, you know, citizen, so to speak. We weren't really sure what it was going to look like.
By the way, so this is also the first methane fueled rocket to ever attempt orbit a launch outside of China. I'm China does not show photos or videos of launches. So this literally was the first time the world was going to see a methane fueled rocket fly. That was the other big thing. So we didn't know what it was going to look like as it was launching to orbit,
and so when it you know and ended up. Of course, a lot of the activity at this point we had, you know, about a thousand people at the company, but so the team didn't need me to do anything. Like they're extremely coordinated, trained, they know exactly what they're doing.
There's it was at caj.
Getting in the way at that point, I mean bothering people.
No, I think I do a good job staying out of the way. I was just enjoying it. I think that was the biggest thing. You know, certainly I was on the hook for whatever happened. To be clear, this is a first launch. No company had ever reached orbit in the world in history on a very first launch, and the major is intense, like you are getting kind of constant pings over the radio hearing as we're loading propellants.
You know, preparing the rocket for flight. You know, each step there's different troubleshooting and things that are happening live because you know, a lot is automated, but it is all happening for the first time. You have tens of thousands of sensors and data channels all over the rocket. It is a very complex coordination. So even though people are well trained, there's on the fly, you know, is this temperature okay? On the batteries, is you know, it's out of bounds?
Like is it okay?
So there's like whole teams of engineers just going and doing calculations and coming back and saying yes, we're good to go. You know, the winds are a big issue, so we're launching weather balloons and tracking wind data to make sure the winds aren't too strong, not at the ground level but way up in the atmosphere because that's
a huge factor of launch success. There's boats and we have Coastguard people chasing boats that are in the violation of the Keypout zone with like you know, we had like people with AK forty seven's trying to tell them like hey, you're you know, illegally in the zone, Like you got to get out of there. We had a Navy plane takeoff from an aircraft carrier in the middle
of you know, almost the launch windows. It's counting down, so it's kind of controlled, very very controlled, but very intense because all of these things are popping up, even at the point of you know, getting down.
To just a few minutes to the to the launch countdown.
And just to be clear, this is purely a test flight, right, there's no commercial payload on it. There's no people on it. Basically just launch in the run.
Yeah, correct, this one. You know, some companies decide to have a payload on the first launch.
We decided not to.
We ended up flying the first the very first shavings of a three D printed part that we ever made seven years ago. The idea behind that was, you know, all of the failure we had to overcome to get to this point, like we're launching that story. I had my Starbucks receipt, you know, every employee got a photo that kind of thing.
But yeah, no, Palin, So okay, so it's time, what like, it's time for the racket to launch.
So as sixty seconds was counting down, the energy is high. Now we had It's very normal for a rocket launch. At first, we had two other attempts that happened in daylight. They got very very close to launching. Actually one of them even ignited all the nine engines and then aborted. So at the time that you're several minutes close to the flight, it's really one hundred percent automated, and then once you're under seventy seconds, it literally is automated, so if anything happens, it just.
Aboords and safes itself. It's all software driven.
So we had had a few other launch attempts that just you know, a sensor was off or some temperatures slightly drifted because a lot of complex things are happening, and those final stuff twenty seconds, so that's also actually contributing to the anxiety and the you know, adrenaline is you actually don't yet know is it definitely going off or definitely not. Of course, it's counting down, so in the engines light it holds down for several seconds until
they get up to full thrust. There's a bunch of health checks, you know, which are all automated on the rocket, and then there's the final command that sends which has release. So right when what are called the rocket holdbacks or hold downs release back. Then the rocket moved up and I saw ice, you know, start kind of falling off of it all over the place because it's really cold propellant, so there's ice all over it. So this ice just like you know, kind of cheers off of it and
looks like a star dust or something coming off. So right when that happened, you know, the engines had already been let. It's like this crazy blue and purple and orange flame like methane rockets, like really really insane compared to normal rockets.
I waited for that moment.
I absolutely had planned I was going to run outside, so I had the path already set and kind of like very very quickly but also careful not to trip and fall. Went out the door and went around the corner, and I just remember the feeling of opening the door, and right when you open it to go outside, it just nails you in the chest. I mean, rockets, of
course are really intensely powerful. I'd seen engine tests before, but yeah, you just immediately feel this like fluttering kind of almost like somebody's pounding your chest a little bit.
The sound is the sound that ye yeah, yeah, so.
Loud, super loud, and then I turned around the corner, so I basically heard it before I saw it. Then turned around the corner, and then you know, just a hundred or so feet in the air, was just this rocket flying and there's a crazy bright blue flame that looks like looking at a star, you know, being launched to space. I mean, videos really don't do it just it is. It is so so much brighter and so
much cooler looking in person. And then you just feel energy in the air, Like the air almost feels dense and thick, and it sounds like a whip cracking plus sub base, you know, just at eleven out of ten intensity, so it feels alive like that. That's what's so cool. Microphones and video really just don't capture the feeling of a live launch because it's like, yeah, just very visceral. And then of course people around me are like screaming
and cheering and crying. You know, we like literally crying like viscerally and say, oh my god, oh my God. Like it's like a pretty religiously spiritually kind of intense experience just because all the hard work and tears go into it. It was out of our control at that point. The rocket flies autonomously, nobody can do anything. But we
needed to get past eighty seconds. So that was the goal of this mission, was to prove the three D print instructures were actually strong enough to serve vibe and flight. That was the very unique technology. My personal goal was to get to space. I think, you know, that was above the company stated goal, but I did really want to get to space on the first flight and have a full first stage you know, successful launch and stage separation. That was really what I wanted. And so, you know,
I was watching kind of the live stream. I had my iPhone next to me, but also just watching live but at least on the YouTube live stream. They were calling out different milestones and I was looking for that eighty second mark to really make sure, yes, we did it. So I remember when we passed eighty seconds. You know, of course, everybody started screaming and cheering because that was full mission success by what we were concerned with, and
it was still rumbling, it was still definitely visible. It was just like a bright blue streak that went across the sky. But then as we made it to space and then had stage separation, you know that that was for me the moment where I really started celebrating and then what happened? Yeah, So then you know, I was looking at the live stream, it became clear that the
second stage engine didn't light. It tried to light, so at first I actually thought it did because there's just some sputtering of flames, but they went out, so it was clear that that second stage didn't light. We weren't going to make it all the way to orbit. So then I went back inside. You know, of course at that point, the team's mood is much more serious, like we're in data collection mode, you know, we're working with the FAA mode to safe everything. Everything there was good.
Then I went down into the basement so kind of took over where the live stream recording was, and then just addressed the overall team.
And what happens to the rocket when the second stage, Like, does it blow itself up? Does it fall into the sea? What happened?
Yeah, it actually just goes and falls in Atlantic Ocean, So it's way out in the middle of the ocean at that point, and then we use satellites later to determine that it, you know, did actually sink. You know, at that point, it's more than ten thousand feet at the bottom of the ocean, so you know, we kind of do all the proper steps to make sure that things are taken care of from a safety perspective.
And so you were saying you went and talked to the company.
Yeah, it was ta talk to the company, address everybody, and then from that moment after, I felt like then I was kind of off the hook, you know. So it's definitely very I was very on up until that point, and then at that point I could stop and then just start to let you know what happened sink in.
We'll be back in a minute to discuss the rocket that Tim and his colleagues are working on now. Also Mars. After that test launch, Tim and his colleagues talk to their customers and potential customers basically companies that want to launch satellites, and based on those conversations, they decided to
develop a much bigger rocket. The one they're working on now is two hundred and seventy feet tall, which is about as tall as a twenty five story building and more than twice as tall as the rocket they launched last year.
So what we're doing for the next three years is building and testing a ton of hardware so we're constantly almost every week doing engine testing, collecting data, using that data to then three D print new versions which slightly tweak the design. This is really the big competitive advantage of printing, as you're able to iterate the design very quickly.
So this is really the kind of core principle of development is doing that first at very small component levels and then building up more and more into a full end and then a full rocket stage which would have thirteen engines on it. We'll actually touch that on the ground before flying, and then so at the time of flights, by the time you actually fly the rocket in twenty twenty six, almost every component on the rocket has already gone through several flight like environments for a full duration.
And yet like if history is a guide, it still probably won't work, right, Like that's how hard it is.
Yeah, reaching orbit on a very first rocket is difficult.
Like, it would be very reasonable for you to do all this work for three years and for it not to work the first time, because that's the way it works.
Yeah, that wouldn't be a total you know, like Company Ender, for example, we would plan for that. The chrick is how do you make a rocket be successful and not have a government's budget to subsidize it. I mean, so NASA is successful on first launches all the time. You know, the Europeans are national security launch vehicles.
Because they spend way more than a private company would ever spend, correct, because they really don't want it to face.
Yeah, exactly.
So the trick is how do you get a low cost rocket which is highly reliable to be successful.
So it's an interesting like optimization problem at some level of like basically when do you launch, Like, you don't want to launch too late, weirdly, right, you don't want to be too sure it's work because that's probably too expensive.
Correct, you have to have a macro view of you know, the overall company. And ultimately, I think this is a pretty interesting lesson learned just in the industry on iteration. So if you look at you know, SpaceX's reliability record for example, is extraordinarily good. But how you get there is a different solution. So traditional aerospace, like you mentioned, needs to get it perfect on the first try.
So NASA everybody does.
And that's sort of for like governmental political reasons, right, Like they have a sort of different constituency than a private company. They're not optimizing for the kind of exactly well, they're not so cost constrained.
Yeah, that's all true, and optics, you're definitely right, they have a different incentive structure. But what's interesting is if you take an approach that we're doing and other commercial companies do, where you build and test a lot of hardware on the ground before you actually do the flight, and then you practice a lot that actually creates a very robust product.
So there is.
A kind of study that I refer to a lot internally where a professor divided an art class into two groups that he gave him an hour to make clay pots. One group he said, make as many claypots as he possibly can in an hour. The next group he said, make a perfect clay pot, and so one he said make as many one was a kind of bid for quality. But then at the end of it, what he didn't tell them is he was just going to judge both
groups based on quality. So what was interesting is the group that made as many as possible, actually, we're almost always considered higher quality, even though he literally didn't tell them to make something that looked good.
Reps. Reps are underrated, reps are underrated. Tell me about Mars. Started out talking about Mars as like the big dream. Tell me more about your dream for Relativity Space and Mars.
Well, I really want Relativity to be the company that builds an industrial base on Mars.
Meaning like factories to build stuff on Mars as opposed to rockets to go to.
Mars exactation too.
So I thought, well, somebody's got to build the factory. It has to be small, lightweight, be able to build a wide range of products with very little human labor because people on Mars won't be quite abundant, and so all of those North Star parameters. To find an intelligent three D printing system. So that was where I got to this idea that three D printing has to be a part of building infrastructure on Mars. If it's going to be a self sustaining city andation.
What's whatever the first thing a factory like that would make.
Yeah, So I think it's going to start with things like spare parts and things that potentially break on rockets. So I imagine most early missions will actually launch some form of three D printing system really just as a way to make the mission more robust in case something went wrong, Because when you're that far away, you know, you are like nine months away from really getting any extra supplies.
And is the advantage of three D printing there that like, ideally you can basically have one three D printer that can make a very wide range of parts as opposed to traditional manufacturing where kind of you need one machine to make one part and it can't make any other part yep, more or less yep exactly.
So you can pre you don't need as much pre planning, and there's a lot more flexibility for what you can build.
So it's a rocket spare parts factory. Yeah, it's basically the first I.
Think that's the very first thing that's likely. And we actually have a relativity a mission that we have a partnership with the co founder and former CTO of SpaceX, this guy Tom Mueller. He started his own company. We're actually planning to launch payload to Mars with with his companies. We have multiple launch windows through twenty twenty nine to be able to do it with them.
And that wait, just to be clear, you're providing the rocket and he's providing the payload.
Yes, we're providing the rocket, he's providing the Mars transfer vehicle. The reentry vehicle and the lander. But I do think, you know, we haven't announced what the payload to will officially be yet. I personally think it would be very cool to send some sort of three D printer.
I think that's probably expected.
But why that's cool is that would actually be the first object ever manufactured by a human being off planet. And I do think that just starting to show we can build things is a really big part of taking first step, so to speak, towards one day having a robust civilization.
We'll be back in a minute with the Lightning round. Okay, last thing to do is the Lightning Round, which is just a bunch of fast questions. So in high school, I've heard you say that you wanted to be a writer and that you actually wrote a couple of novels. So I'm curious, what's your favorite novel?
Yeah, I think so. The novel that brought me to Los Angeles is a book by Brady ston ellis called Less than Zero No Relation to My.
Amazing that that made you want to go to law sex.
I know it is actually amazing.
What's one thing you think everybody should know about how rockets work?
You know? Okay, this is an interesting one.
So I think there's a lot of focus on the rocket in you know, the tube, the structure you can see. I think what actually makes rockets hard is actually a lot of the ancillary systems, so pressure. You know, rockets need to be pressurized, they need to be filled, drained safe successfully. There's different systems you need to start them
up to shut them down. It is the kind of details and the non sexy systems that are you know, firing fire that actually get a lot of conversation time internally because that's what can make a good rocket versus one that doesn't work.
What's the over under on what year you think you'll go to space?
What your I go to space? I think I hope.
I hope by twenty thirty. I think that would be pretty pretty soon.
Yeah, it's pretty soon.
That's going seven years. Yeah, it depends on suborbital versus orbital. Yeah, I think in the next seven years going suborbitally would be would be possible, definitely.
Yeah.
You think it will get cheaper or you think you'll be able to do it because you own a rocket company.
I think it will get cheaper.
I certainly hope it'll get cheaper because I know how much it is now, and it's a it's not the advertised price.
It's expensive.
Was it scary to leave Jeff Bezos Rocket Company, to leave Blue Origin in order to create a new company that would then compete against Jeff Bezos Rocket Company?
Well competing it's Jeff is you know, he's a He's a capable guy. I think Elon maybe more crazy, more irrational from a competitive standpoint, But now I was inspired. I think at the time I was twenty five, my co founder was twenty two. I felt we had very little to lose by trying. I think in hindsight, I realized just how young, spunky, kind of naive.
Maybe we worry about the challenges.
I can definitely tell you it's been way harder than I ever expected to get to this point.
Maybe necessarily naive, maybe usefully naive.
Oh, definitely an usefully naive. I think that was a big benefit.
What's one thing that would surprise me about Jeff Bezos.
I think Jeff.
Really when Yeah, he is actually really patient. So whether it was you know, when his vision of Blue Origin with people living and working in space and industrializing kind of orbid offer.
I thought that was the vision, and that.
He was willing to do it in a way where even if he doesn't see it in his lifetime, he doesn't care. That he doesn't care to a degree that just felt very unusual to me.
Interesting. I mean, you don't think of Jeff Bezos and think, oh, yeah, that that guy is super patient.
Yeah exactly, but but no, he really is, Yeah, he really is.
What do you think? What do you think of the chances you'll go to Mars before you die?
I have this vision of myself being very old and sitting in kind of a beach chair with a beer under some sort of biodome on Mars, and that being you know where I kick it during the retirement I guess, kind.
Of like Arizona, but farther.
Yeah, but you know, under a big glass dome exactly that kind of thing. So, you know, I do have this vision of being there, but I would go towards the end of my life. I think it'd be a cool I mean, could you imagine a crazier end cap to to your whole life by just being on Mars, especially since that's something I'm dedicating my life to make happen now with relativity, I think that'd be you know, pretty pretty cool ending.
Tim Ellis is the co founder and CEO of Relativity Space. Today's show was produced by Edith Russlo and Gabriel Hunter Chang. It was edited by Lydia Jean Kott and engineered by Sarah Bruguer. You can email us at problem at pushkin dot fm, and please do email us. I try and read all the emails. I'm Jacob Goldstein and we'll be back next week with another episode of What's Your Problem.