How it started
Founding and funding
Relativity Space was founded in 2015 by CEO Tim Ellis and CTO Jordan Noone. It was founded to develop and manufacture small-lift rockets capable of carrying satellites into orbit, before pivoting to developing medium-to-heavy lift rockets to meet market demands.
In November 2020, Relativity Space announced its US$500 million Series D funding at a calculated $2.3 billion valuation. In June 2021 Relativity announced another $650 million funding round led by Fidelity Investments at a valuation of $4.2 billion, bringing its total funding to $1.335 billion. The funding will help the development of a partially reusable heavy-lift launch vehicle, the Terran R, targeting a first orbital launch no earlier than 2026. Relativity Space has investors including Baillie Gifford, Blackrock, BOND, Coatue, Fidelity, General Catalyst, ICONIQ Capital, K5 Global, Mark Cuban, Playground Global, Social Capital, Tiger Global, Tribe Capital, and Y Combinator among others.
In March 2025, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt replaced Ellis as CEO of Relativity Space, taking a controlling interest in the company. At this point in time, the company had a contract backlog of over $2.9 billion for Terran R.
Development history
The company's initial attempt to launch its first rocket, named Terran 1, on March 8, 2023 was scrubbed due to technical issues, with a second attempt anticipated for March 11, 2023, which was also scrubbed. On March 23, 2023, Relativity launched its first Terran 1 flight, naming it "Good Luck, Have Fun" and carrying no payload. It achieved its primary mission objective to reach the area of maximum aerodynamic pressure (max-q), but experienced an anomaly during stage two burn and failed to reach orbit.
From Wikipedia’s article on Relativity Space, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.3