Google’s Eric Schmidt Has Invested in Relativity Space’s 3D Printed Rockets – 3DPrint.com

In November 2024, Bloomberg reported that Relativity Space, the Long Beach, California company leveraging additive manufacturing (AM) to produce rockets, was “running low on cash”, citing an anonymous source. Now, the financial news platform is reporting that Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google (now Alphabet Inc.), “has made a significant investment” in Relativity, although the exact size of the investment is unspecified.

Through a representative, Schmidt declined to comment on the investment to Bloomberg. Relativity released a statement that didn’t address Schmidt directly, merely commenting, “We continue to align ourselves with strong capital partners who believe in our mission and are supporting our ambitious programs.”

After Relativity Space launched the Terran 1 in March 2023, the company began work on the Terran R, targeting a 2026 launch date. While the Terran 1 failed to reach orbit, as I noted in my November post about the first Bloomberg article, “…even without reaching orbit, launching and reaching space on the initial flight is a major accomplishment, especially given that Relativity used [AM] for about 85 percent of the finished product.”

Schmidt’s attachment to Relativity Space is exactly the sort of development that could help the company regain its momentum. That would be the case especially if the former CEO’s investment leads Relativity to land additional money from America’s Frontier Fund (AFF), a “nonprofit deep tech fund” founded in 2021. The AFF self-describes its unique mission as an effort “to build the capacity needed for America to endure as the world’s best place for innovators to reach for new frontiers”.

In addition to Schmidt, AFF’s backers also include Peter Thiel, so-called “don of the PayPal Mafia”, and IBM’s former CEO and chairman Sam Palmisano. The CEO of AFF is Gilman Louie, who once headed CIA VC fund In-Q-Tel, while the board includes national security heavy hitters like Trump 1.0 national security advisor HR McMaster, and one-time CIA official Joanne Isham. (McMaster is also a special advisor to Amaero International Limited, an Australian-US metal powders supplier that was just given a $23.5 million loan from the Export-Import Bank of the United States.)

According to a 2023 Bloomberg article, some of AFF’s earliest investments included Hydrosonics, a hydrogen energy startup, and Fab.AI, which bills itself as “the first LLM for advanced manufacturing”. That same article noted that Schmidt’s money doesn’t go toward AFF’s investments, themselves, but rather is devoted toward AFF’s “nonprofit think tank side”.

In any case, even if Schmidt’s backing never leads to AFF money for Relativity Space, the company could benefit from synergy with relevant startups in the AFF portfolio. Moreover, Schmidt’s supposed backing of Relativity is symptomatic of the same context within which an entity like AFF could emerge, a context defined by billionaires’ proactive tightening of their reins over global supply chains by inserting themselves into the US national security landscape.

If Elon Musk wasn’t the inventor of that strategy, he was certainly one of the first to perfect it in its contemporary form, and now serves as a deflector-of-attention away from all the many other (usually tech-oriented) oligarchs doing the same thing. Not to call any of these people evil, but, if this is how the US must be run, it would at least be nice to see some “lesser evil” version billionaires doing the same thing. Buffett, for instance, has been accumulating a historically large cash pile. Throwing a hefty chunk of it into US manufacturing would be about as Buffetesque a last act as I could think of.

Images courtesy of Relativity Space

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