Relativity Space Has Never Reached Orbit. NASA Just Handed It a Mars Mission — and 17 New Job Postings in Seven Days Show the Clock Is Already Ticking

A Mars Mission Relativity Never Expected to Win

On June 17, 2026, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman stood at Relativity Space's Long Beach facility and announced that the company had been selected to design, build, and launch a Mars orbiter carrying NASA's Aeolus atmospheric instrument suite, targeting a late 2028 launch on the company's Terran R reusable rocket. Neither NASA nor Relativity disclosed the contract value.

The Aeolus payload, built at NASA's Ames Research Center, consists of four instruments: a Doppler wind and temperature sounder, a thermal limb sounder, a surface radiometric sensor package, and a wide-field context camera. Together, they will produce the first integrated daily global view of Martian winds, temperatures, dust, and cloud patterns. NASA will operate the instruments for at least one Martian year and develop the data-processing pipeline. The agreement runs under NASA's first six-year reimbursable Space Act Agreement.

The mission anchors Relativity's broader Interplanetary Sciences Program, which the company described as an initiative to "enable radically more science per dollar" by building interplanetary capabilities for commercial, academic, and government partners. The orbiter will also serve as a communications node, providing high-bandwidth laser and radio-frequency links to Earth and relay capability for surface assets on Mars. Relativity said the spacecraft will carry "massive" data storage and "server-class compute" for AI model inference and autonomous operations, though the company did not release spacecraft mass, power, or dimension specifications.

For Relativity, the contract is a sharp pivot. The company shelved its Terran 1 small launch vehicle after a single partially successful flight in 2023 and has since focused entirely on Terran R, a medium-class reusable rocket whose first launch from Cape Canaveral was originally planned for late 2026. Industry sources now expect that debut to slip to 2027, SpaceNews reported. Relativity recently shipped a Terran R second stage from its Long Beach factory to NASA's Stennis Space Center in Mississippi for testing.

Eric Schmidt, the former Google CEO who acquired a majority stake in Relativity in 2025 and installed himself as executive chairman and CEO, called the Interplanetary Sciences Program "a natural step" toward making access to space "more open, reliable and routine." Schmidt's involvement extends beyond the company: his family foundation, Schmidt Sciences, announced plans in January for the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Observatory System, which includes Lazuli, a space telescope with a primary mirror larger than Hubble's that could launch on Terran R as early as 2028.

The risks are real. Relativity has never reached orbit. Terran R has never flown. The company must design a new interplanetary spacecraft, finish a new rocket, and hit a planetary launch window — all roughly two years out.

Inside "The Wormhole" — and Why Long Beach Became Additive Manufacturing's Unlikely Capital

Relativity Space's Long Beach headquarters, a facility the company calls "The Wormhole," houses roughly 2,200 employees and serves as the operational core of a company that has staked its identity on 3D-printing rockets. Since Eric Schmidt acquired the company in early 2025 and injected nearly $800 million in fresh capital, that workforce has been growing. Simplify's data shows a 3% headcount increase over the past year, modest on its surface but significant given the company's pivot under new leadership and the specialized nature of the roles it's filling.

The job postings tell the story more clearly than any press release. In the past seven days alone, Zero G Talent's board tracked 17 new Relativity roles added in Long Beach: vehicle structures engineers, manufacturing engineers for subassemblies, design engineers, integration technicians, and an environmental test lab specialist. These aren't generic aerospace positions. The listings call out laser powder bed fusion, metallic additive manufacturing, design for additive, and process parameter development for multiple alloy systems.

The intern pipeline points in the same direction. Relativity posted a Fall 2025 Additive Manufacturing Modeling & Simulation Intern role in Long Beach paying $28 to $40 per hour, requiring finite element analysis, multiphysics simulation, and automated meshing techniques. The company's careers page directs students through a dedicated internship portal, and past intern projects have included modeling rocket component manufacturing and printing actual engine parts.

What makes Long Beach notable isn't just Relativity's presence. It's the concentration of additive-manufacturing-specific roles in a single zip code. The company's job listings read like a syllabus for an advanced manufacturing degree that didn't exist a decade ago: materials subject matter experts for powder bed fusion, process engineers who own the full chain from design-for-additive through quality verification, simulation interns calibrating models against physical test data. Schmidt's publicly stated ambition to launch data center infrastructure into orbit only deepens the need for this workforce.

The talent magnet is working, quietly. Long Beach isn't competing with Hawthorne or the Seattle area for the same pool of propulsion and avionics engineers. It's pulling a different kind of specialist altogether, one whose expertise lives at the intersection of materials science, robotics, and software-driven manufacturing.

What 203 Open Roles Reveal About Relativity's Next Phase

Relativity's careers page doesn't just list openings. It reads like a blueprint for the company's next phase. A scan of its live job board shows 203 open positions on LinkedIn alone, with 17 added in the past week. The titles tell a story that press releases don't: this is a company shifting from proving it can print rockets to proving it can build them at scale, for missions NASA trusts with interplanetary science.

Start with the additive manufacturing roles. Indeed lists 20 open positions tagged "Additive Manufacturing Engineer" at Relativity. The Built In job description for an Additive Manufacturing Engineer I spells out what the company actually needs: someone who can "develop, optimize, and productionize process parameters for various alloys and machine systems" and "holistically own" the full chain from design-for-additive through build-file programming, work instructions, and quality verification. That's not a research role. That's a production role. The posting even calls out laser powder bed fusion and metallic additive manufacturing as core skills, signaling that Relativity is moving past Terran 1's proof-of-concept prints into the harder problem of repeatable, qualified hardware for the Aeon-R engine that will power Terran R.

Then there's the structures pipeline. LinkedIn shows a Senior Structures Responsible Engineer, a Senior Structures Engineer, a Senior Vehicle Structures Engineer, and a Vehicle Structures Engineer I — all posted within hours of each other, all in Long Beach. That concentration isn't accidental. Terran R is a medium-to-heavy lift reusable vehicle, and reusability means structural margins get punished on every flight cycle. Relativity needs people who can design, analyze, and qualify airframes that survive repeated ascent, reentry, and landing loads — and it needs them now, not in two years.

The GNC postings point toward mission assurance. Relativity is hiring GNC Performance Engineer I roles for 2025 new graduates, with job descriptions that reference trajectory design, aerodynamics integration, and reliability analysis across all vehicle systems. For a company that just won a NASA Mars orbiter contract, guidance, navigation, and control isn't a nice-to-have. It's the difference between reaching the right orbit and becoming space debris. The fact that these are new-grad roles suggests Relativity is building bench depth in a discipline where experienced hires are scarce and expensive.

Layer in the propulsion manufacturing roles — a Propulsion Manufacturing Engineer II for Combustion Devices, a Propulsion Technician II, a Lead Manufacturing Test Engineer — and a pattern emerges. Relativity isn't just hiring more engineers. It's hiring engineers who sit at the intersection of additive manufacturing and flight hardware: people who understand how a printed combustion chamber behaves under test, how to qualify a printed alloy for a Mars transfer trajectory, how to close the loop between what the printer produces and what the vehicle demands.

The salary ranges confirm the urgency. Manufacturing Engineer II roles and Vehicle Structures Engineer I are competitive with SpaceX and Blue Origin for equivalent experience levels. Relativity is paying to pull talent into Long Beach rather than expecting candidates to find them.

What the roles don't show is just as telling. There's little here about business development, sales, or constellation design. The hiring is almost entirely concentrated in manufacturing engineering, structures, propulsion, and GNC — the four disciplines that determine whether a 3D-printed rocket can fly to Mars and back reliably. NASA didn't hand Relativity an orbiter contract because of a slick pitch deck. It handed it one because Relativity demonstrated it could print and fly hardware. Now the hiring board shows the company is staffing up to prove it can do the same thing at production tempo, with the quality margins a deep-space mission demands.

Why NASA Bet on a Company That's Never Reached Orbit

The June 17 announcement that NASA had selected Relativity Space to deliver a science orbiter to Mars was, on its surface, a contract award. In practice, it was a signal that the agency's procurement philosophy for deep-space missions has shifted, and that legacy aerospace incumbents are no longer the default choice for getting hardware to other planets.

Under the partnership, NASA will provide the Aeolus atmospheric-science instrument payload suite, developed at Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley. Relativity supplies the spacecraft, the Terran R launch vehicle, and cruise operations to deliver the instruments to Mars. NASA will support science operations for at least one Martian year (roughly 687 Earth days) while Relativity maintains the spacecraft.

NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman framed the rationale directly. "Public-private partnerships like this are a force multiplier for science," he said in the agency's announcement. "By pairing NASA's world-class instruments with commercial innovation and investment, we can deliver more science, more often, and reduce the time it takes to get essential data into the hands of researchers preparing for future human missions to Mars."

The decision didn't come out of nowhere. In May 2024, NASA's Mars Exploration Program awarded concept study contracts to nine companies — including Lockheed Martin, Blue Origin, SpaceX, Firefly Aerospace, and Impulse Space — to evaluate how commercial services could support lower-cost, higher-frequency Mars missions. Each awardee received between $200,000 and $300,000 to study payload delivery, communications relay, surface imaging, and payload hosting. Eric Ianson, then director of NASA's Mars Exploration Program, said at the time that "now is the right time for NASA to begin looking at how public-private partnerships could support science at Mars in the coming decades."

The 2024 studies were explicitly designed to test whether the private sector could do what NASA had historically done itself: build and operate interplanetary spacecraft. The Relativity award is the first time that test produced an actual mission.

What makes the pick striking is Relativity's track record — or lack of one. The company has never launched a payload into orbit. Its Terran 1 rocket flew once, in March 2023, and failed to reach orbit after a second-stage engine shutdown. The Terran R, the vehicle slated for the Mars mission, has not yet flown; its maiden launch from Cape Canaveral was originally targeted for late 2026 but has slipped to 2027, according to industry sources cited by SpaceNews.

NASA, in other words, is betting on a company whose rocket exists primarily in development, against competitors with decades of flight heritage. Blue Origin's New Glenn has faced its own delays but benefits from the company's substantial resources and experience with the BE-4 engine. Lockheed Martin has built spacecraft for every major NASA planetary mission of the past thirty years.

The answer lies partly in cost structure and partly in manufacturing approach. Relativity's entire premise is that 3D-printed rockets can be built faster, with fewer parts, and at lower cost than traditionally manufactured vehicles. The company prints the majority of its rocket components, a process it argues reduces the part count from tens of thousands to hundreds. NASA has its own interest in additive manufacturing — the agency has explored 3D-printed electronics, printed battery grounding straps, and metal printing in microgravity aboard the ISS. Awarding a deep-space mission to the most aggressive additive-manufacturing company in the launch sector is a way for NASA to stress-test that thesis on an actual interplanetary timeline.

There is also the question of speed. NASA's traditional procurement model for flagship planetary missions (think Mars Science Laboratory or Europa Clipper) runs on decade-long development cycles with budgets in the billions. The Aeolus partnership is structured to move faster and spend less, with Relativity bearing a significant share of development costs. SpaceNews reported that Relativity is working with an undisclosed philanthropic organization to help fund the mission, a detail that suggests the company is supplementing its own investment with outside capital to absorb risk that would normally fall on NASA's budget.

Dr. Eugene Tu, center director at NASA Ames, positioned the partnership as consistent with the center's role as "NASA's Innovation Center of Excellence." He said Aeolus "reflects how innovative collaboration accelerates science and strengthens the foundation needed for one day landing humans on Mars."

The mission's scientific goals are concrete. Aeolus will provide the first integrated, daily, global view of Martian winds, temperatures, dust, and clouds — data that directly informs entry, descent, and landing systems for future crewed missions. Previous orbiters like MAVEN, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, and Mars Odyssey studied pieces of the atmosphere independently. Aeolus combines all four key parameters into a single daily picture, which has never been done.

Relativity's spacecraft will also serve as a communications node, offering high-bandwidth laser and radio-frequency links to Earth and radio-frequency relay for surface assets. The company has said the orbiter will carry "massive" data storage and "server-class compute" capable of running artificial intelligence models autonomously — capabilities that go well beyond a standard science platform and suggest Relativity is building infrastructure, not just a one-off mission.

The broader context is that NASA is no longer the only organization that can run an interplanetary mission. SpaceX is developing Starship for Mars transport. Blue Origin is positioning New Glenn for deep-space payloads. Relativity's Interplanetary Sciences Program, announced alongside the NASA partnership, is explicitly designed to make the company a platform for future solar-system missions, not just a launch provider.

NASA chose Relativity not because it was the safest option, but because the agency's calculus has changed. The question is no longer which company has the longest flight heritage. It is which one can deliver the mission fast enough, cheaply enough, and with enough built-in flexibility to make Mars science a recurring activity rather than a once-a-decade event.

Three Companies, One Planet — Who Gets There First?

The Aeolus contract doesn't just make Relativity Space a Mars company. It makes Relativity a Mars competitor, directly against the two companies its founders once worked for.

SpaceX has dominated the launch market for a decade, but it has never sent its own mission to Mars. Elon Musk's 2018 Tesla Roadster flew past the planet on a heliocentric orbit; it carried no instruments, no science, no operational purpose. Starship, the vehicle Musk has said will carry humans to Mars, has yet to reach orbit as of mid-2026. If Relativity's Aeolus launches on schedule in 2028, it will be the first private mission to reach the Red Planet — a symbolic win that matters in recruiting, fundraising, and NASA's long-term vendor diversification strategy.

Blue Origin occupies a different position. Jeff Bezos's company has been developing New Glenn, a heavy-lift rocket that flew its first successful booster landing in 2025 after years of delays. Blue Origin holds NASA contracts for the Artemis lunar lander and has stated ambitions for Mars, but its timeline for deep-space missions remains vague. The company's hiring reflects that breadth: Blue Origin added 118 roles on Zero G Talent's board in the past week alone, spanning thermal subsystem design, fluids engineering, and sourcing recruitment across its Seattle, Florida, and California sites.

SpaceX, meanwhile, is hiring at a scale that dwarfs both competitors. The company added 129 roles in the past seven days on Zero G Talent's board, concentrated on Starship production in Starbase, Texas, and Falcon/Dragon operations in Hawthorne, California. Positions range from equipment reliability engineers to production schedulers. The volume signals a company in full production mode, not just development.

Relativity's 17 new roles in the same period look modest by comparison. But the composition tells a different story. Vehicle structures engineers, manufacturing engineers for subassemblies, integration technicians for thrust structures — these are the people who build flight hardware, not prototypes. The salaries are competitive with SpaceX's published ranges for similar levels. Relativity is spending to staff a production line for Terran R while simultaneously designing an interplanetary spacecraft.

The talent war here isn't just about headcount. It's about mission-specific expertise. SpaceX has deep experience in orbital operations and reusability but no track record in planetary science missions. Blue Origin has NASA relationships and heavy-lift development but has struggled to convert hardware into flight cadence. Relativity is betting that its 3D-printed manufacturing approach (printing rocket structures in weeks rather than months) can compress the timeline enough to beat both to Mars.

NASA, for its part, seems to want exactly this competition. Administrator Isaacman framed the Aeolus partnership as a way to "deliver more science, more often," but the subtext is risk distribution. The agency's dependence on SpaceX for launch services has grown steadily; having a second provider capable of deep-space missions gives NASA leverage on price, schedule, and political resilience. Startup Fortune's analysis put it bluntly: the Aeolus decision is "either visionary or a warning sign about SpaceX dependency."

The 2028 launch window is the forcing function. Mars transfer opportunities open roughly every 26 months. Miss 2028 and Relativity waits until 2030, by which time SpaceX could have flown Starship to orbit multiple times and Blue Origin could have established New Glenn as a reliable heavy-lifter. Terran R's first flight, currently targeted for late 2026, leaves almost no margin for delay.

Eric Schmidt, who took over as CEO in March 2025 after acquiring a controlling stake, has personal incentives beyond the NASA contract. His family philanthropy, Schmidt Sciences, is funding Lazuli, a space telescope with a primary mirror larger than Hubble's, intended to launch on Terran R as early as 2028. Schmidt and Musk already clash publicly over AI safety; beating SpaceX to Mars would be a tangible counterargument in a rivalry that has so far been mostly rhetorical.

The engineers making these decisions are choosing between three very different bets. SpaceX offers scale, flight heritage, and Musk's gravitational pull as a recruiter. Blue Origin offers stability, NASA pedigree, and Bezos's patience as a long-term backer. Relativity offers a smaller team, a faster-moving culture, and the chance to be first — at the risk of being first to fail.

Additive Manufacturing's Inflection Point — in Numbers and Job Listings

The aerospace additive manufacturing market is projected to grow from USD 5.93 billion in 2025 to USD 13.45 billion by 2033, according to Future Market Report. Global Market Insights puts the 2025 baseline at USD 2.2 billion, forecasting USD 12.4 billion by 2035 at an 18.4% CAGR. Research and Markets tracks the broader additive manufacturing sector growing from USD 28.27 billion in 2026 to USD 59.27 billion by 2030. The variance in base-year estimates reflects different scope definitions, but the direction is unanimous: this is a market accelerating past the prototype phase.

Relativity's hiring surge in Long Beach is one visible signal of that acceleration. The company posted 17 new roles in the past week alone: vehicle structures engineers, manufacturing engineers for subassemblies, integration technicians for thrust structures. These aren't R&D positions. They're production-floor roles, many specifying second-shift work, which means Relativity is staffing for sustained manufacturing output, not one-off demonstrations.

That distinction matters. For years, additive manufacturing in aerospace meant printing a bracket, testing it, certifying it, and calling it a win. The bottleneck was never the printer. It was everything after. Post-processing, inspection, certification, and the sheer difficulty of scaling from tens of parts to thousands. The Future Market Report notes that high qualification complexity and limited scalability remain the market's two primary restraints. Relativity's job listings — manufacturing engineers, integration technicians, environmental test lab specialists — map directly onto those exact bottlenecks. The company is hiring its way past them.

The broader industry is following the same playbook. GE Additive, EOS GmbH, Stratasys, 3D Systems, and Carpenter Additive collectively held 26.9% of the global aerospace additive manufacturing market in 2025, Global Market Insights found. All five have expanded their aerospace-specific capabilities in the past year. EOS introduced four new metal powders for aerospace applications in October 2025. 3D Systems won a USD 7.65 million U.S. Air Force contract in August 2025 to develop a large-format metal printer for flight-relevant structures. Stratasys launched new high-performance filaments for aerospace production in April 2026. These are not prototyping investments. They are production-scale commitments.

The technology mix is shifting accordingly. Powder bed fusion held a 53.4% market share in 2025, but binder jetting is growing at a 23.6% CAGR through 2035 — the fastest of any process segment, Global Market Insights reports. Binder jetting's appeal is speed and scalability, which is exactly what the industry needs when it moves from printing one fuel nozzle to printing hundreds. Directed energy deposition is also gaining traction for large structural components and repair applications. Pratt & Whitney launched an additive repair solution using DED for GTF engine components in April 2025, cutting repair times by over 60%.

The space segment led all end-use categories in 2025 with a 31.6% market share, a Global Market Insights report found. That's the segment where Relativity operates, and where the hiring pressure is most acute. Agnikul Cosmos in India printed the world's largest single-piece Inconel rocket engine in August 2025. A Korean consortium 3D-printed a titanium fuel tank that passed space-grade durability tests the same month. Rocket Lab, Ursa Major, and Beehive Industries are all scaling additive production for engine components. Each of these milestones requires the same workforce Relativity is hiring for: metallurgists who understand Inconel microstructures, process engineers who can qualify build parameters, technicians who can operate and maintain industrial-scale printers around the clock.

North America held 35.6% of the aerospace additive manufacturing market in 2025, with the U.S. alone accounting for USD 702.2 million, Global Market Insights's data shows. But Asia Pacific is growing faster — a 20.6% CAGR through 2035 versus North America's more mature base. China, India, Japan, and South Korea are all investing in domestic aerospace additive capacity. The talent competition is becoming global, not regional.

Relativity's 17 open roles in Long Beach are a small number against the thousands of positions the broader industry needs to fill. But they're a precise signal. When a company that has bet its entire manufacturing thesis on 3D printing starts hiring second-shift manufacturing engineers and thrust-structure integration technicians, it means the inflection point isn't coming. It's here.

Can Long Beach Produce Enough Engineers to Reach Mars?

Relativity's NASA Mars orbiter contract didn't just hand the company a flagship mission. It handed it a hiring problem that no amount of venture capital can solve alone.

The company is scaling toward a 2028 deep-space deadline while competing for a thin pool of engineers who understand both additive manufacturing and spacecraft systems — two disciplines that barely existed in the same job description a decade ago. Those 17 new Relativity roles sit within a broader Space Beach ecosystem where roughly 6,000 workers are already employed by aerospace companies, according to the Long Beach Business Journal, and local executives say the skilled workforce is the binding constraint on growth.

"Workforce is our biggest limiting force," Adam Spice, Rocket Lab's chief financial officer, said at the 2025 Space Beach luncheon. "We're nearing the point of not having enough workers." Josh Brost, Relativity's chief revenue officer, pointed to the speed of the problem: "Our needs are changing every week." He suggested hybrid certificate programs that swap traditional requirements for on-the-job training, an acknowledgment that standard curricula can't keep pace with what a 3D-printed rocket company actually needs.

The specific gaps are not generic. Relativity's open roles reveal a company hunting for manufacturing engineers who can run subassembly lines on second shift, vehicle structures engineers who understand both design and the metallurgy of printed alloys, and integration technicians who can work on thrust structures. These aren't roles you fill with a standard aerospace engineering degree. They require hands-on experience with directed energy deposition, powder-bed fusion, or the inspection regimes that go with them — skills that only a handful of university programs teach in any depth.

That's where the local institutional partnerships come in, and why they matter to Relativity's timeline. California State University, Long Beach enrolls more than 5,000 engineering students and graduates over 1,200 engineers and computer scientists each year, according to the university's Space Beach Initiative. Its aerospace program ranks No. 3 nationally among non-doctoral programs in U.S. News & World Report. Over the next decade, CSULB expects to produce about 15,000 degreed or certified engineers and technical professionals through the initiative.

But the pipeline doesn't start at the university level. At the March 2026 Space Beach Luncheon, education leaders from Long Beach Unified School District, Long Beach City College, and CSULB laid out a deliberate stack: dual enrollment programs that expose high school students to aerospace career pathways, LBCC's advanced manufacturing apprenticeship program that gets people into the industry quickly, and CSULB's project-based learning courses designed to mirror actual company work. The Long Beach Promise, a partnership providing two years of free community college tuition and guaranteed CSULB admission, widens the funnel at the bottom.

Adrian Wright, Relativity's senior manager for engine supply chain and supplier development, said at the same event that the company is in active conversation with local schools about "how to fill up the youth pipeline so they're ready for these next-level jobs to meet the shortage that we see." Christopher Reese, CSULB's associate vice president of university relations, pushed the responsibility back toward the companies: "If you want students to have applied learning, then you need to ask yourself, are you making those opportunities available? Have you figured out how to be internship-ready?"

The national context makes this local work urgent. An estimated 3.8 million manufacturing jobs will need to be filled by 2033, GE Aerospace reported, and 56% of aerospace and defense companies report difficulty hiring skilled manufacturing workers. The additive manufacturing sector specifically faces a small pool of qualified, experienced individuals, according to a CareerConnect Washington sector summary — a bottleneck that intensifies when companies like Relativity, Rocket Lab, and Vast are all pulling from the same regional labor market.

Relativity's Mars contract gives it a recruiting narrative that most employers can't match. But narrative doesn't close a skills gap. The company's ability to deliver a 3D-printed orbiter by 2028 depends on whether Long Beach's institutional pipeline (from high school dual enrollment through CSULB's 15,000-engineer decade) can produce people who understand both how to print metal and how to fly it to Mars. The partnerships exist. The question is whether they can scale fast enough.

Working in space? Zero G Talent tracks the openings: browse space jobs, openings at SpaceX, Blue Origin and Relativity Space, and the people building the field.