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LONG BEACH (CNS) - A Long Beach firm that uses 3-D printers to build rockets today announced that it will take over the one-million-square-foot building where Boeing used to build the C-17 Globemaster military cargo jet.
The move to the building east of Wardlow Road and Cherry Street will enable Relativity Space to increase its production capacity by a factor of 10 and produce a new heavy-lift, reusable two-stage rocket Terran R, according to CEO Tim Ellis.
The firm plans to keep its current, 150,000-square-foot facility in Long Beach and will continue to build the expendable Terran 1 for smaller payloads.
Relativity Space -- which signed a 16-and-a-half-year lease – will open the factory in January and plans to hire at least 200 employees by the end of the year. But the building has a capacity for over 2,000 employees.
“We're certainly going to get into the thousands [of new hires] as we're launching Terran 1 and then kicking off Terran R development as well,'' Ellis said.
The company uses proprietary Stargate 3D printers to make its rockets, and Ellis told TechCrunch the new factory facility could enable Relativity to expand into other aerospace products down the line.
“We will actually have a lot of extra print capacity over time, because we'll be reusing Terran R. So at that point, we'll have a ton of printers with a bunch of free time,'' he said. “You could imagine what one does, once you have that capability, you just keep diving into the next product.''
Boeing closed the facility in 2015, and sold the property in 2019.
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