Within a week of leaving Blue Origin, Tim Ellis sent a cold email to Mark Cuban, titled 'Space is Sexy 3D Printing an Entire Rocket.' Cuban replied within minutes, Ellis later said, and offered $500,000. (Accounts differ on the exact terms.) That same week Ellis applied to Y Combinator.
It was a long way from where he started. He grew up in Plano, Texas, the eldest of three, and as a kid he filmed homemade zombie movies with friends. He went to USC to become a screenwriter. After his freshman year, he has said, he was not very excited about aerospace.
He grew up in Plano, Texas, the eldest of three, and as a kid he filmed homemade zombie movies with friends.
What almost nobody expects from a rocket founder is that he arrived by accident. In his sophomore year he joined the USC Rocket Propulsion Lab, and it changed the plan. He ended with a bachelor's and a master's in aerospace engineering and a leadership role in the lab, alongside classmate Jordan Noone.
Then came Blue Origin: three consecutive internships and two years full-time. There he created the company's first metal 3D printing program, often working nights and weekends on it because it was not his main job. He raised the idea with Jeff Bezos, who reportedly found it promising but not enough to act on. Ellis decided to start his own company.
Founded in 2015, Relativity grew on a bold claim: print most of the rocket. The money followed. A $500 million round in 2020 valued it at $2.3 billion, and in June 2021 Fidelity led $650 million at $4.2 billion, bringing the total to $1.335 billion.
Then the hard part. On March 23, 2023, Terran 1 flew for the first time, called 'Good Luck, Have Fun.' It survived max-q, the point of greatest stress, but an upper-stage anomaly kept it from orbit. A month later the company retired Terran 1 to focus on the larger, partially reusable Terran R.
In March 2025 came the sharper turn: Eric Schmidt replaced Ellis as CEO and took a controlling interest. Ellis stayed as co-founder and board member. Relativity reported a Terran R backlog above $2.9 billion, qualified its Aeon R engine in July 2025, and in June 2026 announced a NASA partnership for a Mars orbiter planned for 2028. Terran R's first launch has slipped to no earlier than 2026.
Ellis has said relentlessness is the most important skill he has learned. A man who set out to write films ended up building rockets, and the idea that carried him there was one he worked on in his spare nights.