NASA Taps Eric Schmidt’s Relativity Space for Mars Mission
NASA has awarded Relativity Space a contract to build a spacecraft that will carry scientific instruments to Mars, handing the rocket company controlled by former Google chief Eric Schmidt its first major deep-space assignment. The contract, announced this week, follows a structure NASA has used with commercial partners before: an initial mission that validates the vehicle, with larger opportunities to follow. Schmidt, who acquired the company last year, described the award as a validation of Relativity’s approach to building rockets and spacecraft with advanced manufacturing techniques.
The mission will see Relativity build a spacecraft designed to deliver NASA payloads to the red planet. Details of the contract’s value and timeline were not disclosed, but people familiar with the arrangement said the work is intended to demonstrate the company’s ability to execute deep-space missions, a prerequisite for the larger contracts NASA could award in the years ahead. The agency has increasingly favored commercial partnerships over its own in-house development, a strategy that began with cargo deliveries to the space station and has since expanded into crewed flight.
Relativity Space has had a shorter and more turbulent history than the company’s new role suggests. Founded in 2015, it set out to build rockets using large-scale 3D printing, promising faster production and cheaper launch costs. Its first small rocket flew only once before the company abandoned it in favor of a larger vehicle designed for the commercial launch market. That vehicle has yet to fly, which makes the Mars award a significant vote of confidence from an agency that has historically been cautious with unproven hardware.
Schmidt’s arrival changed the company’s trajectory. The former executive chairman of Google’s parent company acquired Relativity in 2025, providing capital and a public profile the company had lacked. He has since positioned himself as an investor in space infrastructure, and the NASA contract gives him a foothold in the government market that launch companies typically spend years cultivating. A person close to the company said Schmidt’s network and his willingness to fund long-horizon projects were factors in the agency’s decision.
The contract structure is notable for what it signals about NASA’s procurement philosophy. The agency’s early commercial space efforts, which paid companies to deliver cargo and later crew to orbit, began with modest demonstration missions before expanding into sustained contracts. NASA appears to be applying the same logic to deep space: give a company a real mission, see how it performs, and use that experience to qualify it for bigger work. The approach has turned commercial partners into fixtures of the American space program, and it may now do the same for planetary science.
For Relativity, the Mars mission is a chance to prove that its manufacturing model scales beyond Earth orbit. The company’s 3D-printing approach is intended to cut the number of parts in a rocket and the time needed to build one, advantages that matter more on long-duration missions where reliability is paramount. Skeptics note that the company’s large launch vehicle has yet to reach space, and that a Mars spacecraft is a far more demanding engineering problem than a commercial launch. NASA’s willingness to take that risk, they said, reflects both the agency’s confidence in Relativity’s team and its eagerness to expand the number of companies capable of deep-space work.
The broader space economy has been reshaped in recent years by the rise of a few dominant players, and NASA has been careful to cultivate alternatives. Relativity now joins a short list of companies with government deep-space assignments, a position that carries both prestige and the promise of future revenue. The Mars contract is small in dollar terms relative to the agency’s flagship programs, but its strategic value is larger: it places Schmidt’s company inside the institutional framework of American planetary exploration.
Schmidt has described his space investments as a continuation of his interest in large technical systems, from search engines to artificial intelligence. The NASA award suggests that interest is now being rewarded with access to the most exclusive club in the industry. Whether Relativity can convert the opportunity into a successful mission will be tested over the next several years, but the contract itself has already changed the company’s standing. It is no longer just a launch startup with an unusual manufacturing process. It is a NASA partner on the way to Mars. Mars missions have historically been the province of a handful of aerospace primes and NASA’s own centers, with development cycles measured in decades. Relativity’s path into that club has been unusually fast, and its manufacturing approach is a bet that the industry’s conventions can be upended the way Schmidt’s earlier companies upended software. The company has expanded its workforce and its test facilities since the acquisition, and it is developing the large rocket that would carry its hardware beyond Earth orbit. The NASA award does not require that rocket to be flight-proven before the spacecraft work begins, a detail that analysts said shows how far the agency has moved from its old insistence on demonstrated capability, and how much it now depends on commercial partners to carry the burden of new space infrastructure.
This article was prepared by Rhino Finance’s editorial team based on public reporting.
