NASA Partners With Rocket Company on Mars Mission

NASA announced on June 17, 2026 that it will work with Relativity Space, a Los Angeles-based rocket company, to launch a mission to Mars. The deal gives Relativity responsibility for building and flying the spacecraft and rocket, and running the journey itself. For a company founded less than ten years ago, this is a major vote of confidence — especially since Relativity built its reputation on 3D printing rockets, a method that was once considered experimental and is now becoming mainstream.

The Journey From First Flight to Mars

Relativity proved its core idea worked in March 2023, when its Terran 1 rocket became the first fully 3D-printed rocket to reach space. The rocket didn't complete everything it was supposed to do, but it crossed the Kármán line—the agreed-upon boundary of space at 62 miles up—and showed that the 3D printing approach was sound. Since then, the company has focused on Terran R, a larger rocket designed to be reused many times, and already announced plans with another company called Impulse Space to target Mars landings as a future goal.

NASA has been quietly laying groundwork with Relativity for years. Starting in October 2022, the company began building engine test facilities at NASA's Stennis Space Center in Mississippi. Then in September 2023, NASA formally upgraded Relativity's access to a historic test stand — one that previously tested the engines for the Saturn V moon rocket and the Space Launch System today. When NASA gives a young company access to facilities like that, it sends a signal: we believe this company can do what it says.

Why This Matters Now

NASA is not betting its Mars program on one company. Blue Origin won a Mars contract from NASA in February 2023, and Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket is larger and more proven than Relativity's. The fact that NASA is now signing a second commercial company to a Mars mission—and a younger company with fewer flights—tells you something about how serious the agency is about getting to Mars. It is spreading the work across multiple companies rather than relying on just one.

Relativity has the money to back this up. A $650 million funding round in June 2021 was specifically raised to build the Terran R rocket. Most young rocket companies never see that kind of funding. But money alone is not enough to win a NASA contract. This partnership also gives Relativity something you cannot buy: proof that NASA trusts the company to do one of the hardest jobs in spaceflight.

What Makes This Demanding

Flying to Mars is not like launching satellites into Earth orbit. Think of it as the difference between a car trip across town and a cross-country drive. The journey takes six to nine months, and the spacecraft has to work by itself the entire time—there is no pit crew nearby if something breaks.

Mission planners have to steer the spacecraft precisely along the path to Mars, which requires course corrections every few weeks. Those corrections are tiny adjustments, but they have to be exact. The spacecraft also has to stay in constant contact with NASA's Deep Space Network, a system of radio dishes around the world that can hear signals from hundreds of millions of miles away. Getting all of this right—the spacecraft design, the launch rocket, the communications, the guidance—is something NASA has done many times. Relativity has not.

The announcement from NASA on June 17 does not spell out exactly how much of this work Relativity will do alone and how much NASA will oversee or help with. When the spacecraft is 100 million kilometers away, the line between "Relativity operates it" and "NASA operates it with Relativity's hardware" becomes a real question. That gap in the announcement deserves attention as the partnership moves forward.

Still, what is clear is that Relativity has moved from being a startup that proved it could launch rockets to being an official NASA partner on one of the most difficult missions the space agency flies. That is the kind of transition that, in this author's view, signals a shift in how NASA trusts younger commercial space companies — not just to build one component, but to carry the full weight of a deep-space mission.