Figuring out what's next
It’s easier if you start with Salsa
Thirty years ago, Salsa was making moves. Pace Thick and Chunky was taking it to Heinz 57 and soon the unthinkable would happen — Salsa would dethrone Ketchup as America’s favorite condiment.
My college buddy Frank called it. Called it for Salsa before it was hot. Announced it to us all when we were hanging out one summer eating burgers with ketchup. Campbell’s would go on to buy David Pace’s San Antonio-based salsa company for over a billion dollars.
We all missed out on that opportunity.
10 years later, Nostradamus Frank (baller, shot caller and Wirepine CIO) called another shot: batteries.
We were wiser then, so there’s no excuse we aren’t sipping Mai Tais on our private islands now, but no, we’re still eating burgers with salsa while batteries are booming.
One word: batteries.
A new generation gives me hope. The Chaos Monkey landed an internship at battery startup QuantumScape. Better batteries is really the best I can do to describe what they do. Crazy science with solid state batteries that don’t have a physical anode. The tech must be good, because they’re well funded, including Volkswagen betting on them for their next gen EVs.
Chaos Monkey spends a lot of time in clean rooms, working on measurements in an engineering field called Metrology. QuantumScape’s battery’s require precision manufacturing where components are measured in microns (fractions of a human hair), and he’s been a 3D printing fiend, designing QA tools to validate these measurements.
Which brings me to 3D printing Rockets. How? Some background:
When I was working on Microsoft Teams and we were transitioning Skype’s calling capabilities, there was a critical infrastructure group we depended on for the core real-time cloud micro services providing scaled chat, calling and conferencing. That group is called IC3 or Intelligent Communications and Collaboration Cloud.
I had been babysitting a lot of unhappy customers with the performance of our commercial Skype services and we couldn’t afford any more missteps or we’d lose them. I wrote up some of these challenges when Microsoft retired Skype.
We had to get it right in Microsoft Teams.
I was worried that IC3 couldn’t pull it off, but my boss had confidence in the new engineering leader from Amazon we brought in. That guy was Scott Van Vliet. Scott would come to sponsor some of my customers; I got to know and like him.
So, when Scott left Microsoft to join Relativity Space — a company with a mission to print rockets — I was surprised. Didn’t sound like a good move or even a real thing. But I was making my own moves, about to leave Microsoft as well, and had other things on my mind.
If you read my piece last week, you know I have no such constraints now and I’ve been catching up while doing my part by binge buying NASA snow globes. Talking with the Chaos Monkey about what he’s up to in his battery startup, and the burgeoning commercial space industry, I remembered Scott’s odd career move.
How can you possibly print a rocket — a machine exposed to the most extreme forces in the world?
Part of the answer, and the reason Scott went to Relativity Space, is AI and Software. This isn’t your favorite hallucinating chatbot. Scott built sophisticated machine learning systems that measure and control 3D printers and other robotic assembly elements, constantly finding defects and optimizing in real time. Relativity calls it their FOS or Factory Operating System, and it’s the evolution of GE’s failed attempt to automate factories.
In this video, Relativity founder and CEO Tim Ellis shows the biggest 3D printer in the world creating a component that looks like more organic than manufactured — like a seashell designed by nature, but no, it’s AI, and that’s what’s next1.
One word: 3D Printed Rockets.
Relativity Space launched the Terran 1 in 2023, and while it was successful in reaching space, the second stage failed to ignite and reach orbit. Scott Van Vliet boomeranged back to Microsoft, returning to lead a new Enterprise Agenic AI team.
Relativity pushed past the launch, shifting focus to building a larger reusable rocket called the Terran R, with the cargo capacity needed to compete with SpaceX’s Falcon workhorse rocket.
Tim had the magic mix of building and selling, securing a backlog of billions in launch orders. Here’s an early Y Combinator video of him 10 years ago (he looks 14 but he’s 25) pitching for VC money.
If we don’t get funding, we’re going to do it anyway, because we’re crazy …
I thought this was the end of the story. Keep on keeping on, make the rockets, launch the rockets. Wooo 3D printing! Go Tim, go space!
But then I wondered — investigative journalist that I am — why did Relativity’s PR machine go dark after their first (and only) launch?
Well, crazy is as crazy does, and in an unexpected plot twist, Eric Schmidt is in as CEO of Relativity Space and Tim Ellis is out.
This happened just a few months ago, here’s Tim’s announcement:
Today marks a bold new chapter as Eric Schmidt becomes Relativity’s CEO, while also providing substantial financial backing. I know there’s no one more tenacious or passionate to propel this dream forward. We have been working together to ensure a smooth transition, and I’ll proudly continue to support the team as Co‑founder and Board member.
If you haven’t heard of Eric, he’s the adult Google’s board brought in to manage things after Sergey and Larry got a little crazy. He did a pretty good job. This is Eric’s first gig since he retired from Google 10 years ago; he’s 69.
Eric is worth some billions, although not as many billions as other rocket bros Musk and Bezos. Eric doesn’t have the same founder swagger as these guys, he’s got a PhD in Computer Science from UC Berkeley and he’s known for a more studied approach.
Relativity booked more orders than they could fill, and their biggest problem is execution. In this latest update on the Terran R, they explain how they’ve backed away from their founding principal of 3D printing everything:
What I couldn’t figure out is why did Eric jump into the fray? He’s been remarkably quiet on it; I couldn’t find any public statement from him or Relativity. What Eric has been talking about is AI. Eric has deep AI roots, bringing the DeepMind AI team over to Google in 2016.
Eric wants you to know he thinks AI is Under-Hyped.
Just a few weeks before Eric became Relativity’s new CEO, he appeared before Congress, making the case that to sustain AIs explosive growth we’re going to need more energy, a LOT more energy.
Eric Berger at Arstechnica connects the dots:
After seeing these comments by Schmidt, I reasoned that the former Google executive might have bought Relativity Space as a means to support the development of data centers in space. Such data centers, ideally, would be powered by solar panels and be able to radiate heat into the vacuum of space.
Eric Berger posted this on X and the next day, Schmidt replied with a single word: “Yes”
I wrote about Datacenters gone wild last year — but Datacenters in Space!?
Is Eric Schmidt messing with us, or could this really be what’s next?