Tim Ellis sent Mark Cuban, seven years ago, a life-changing Cold Email.

Ellis worked as an engineer for Blue Origin’s space startup. He dreamed about starting his own company. Cuban received a cold email from Ellis containing an investment pitch. It called space “sexy” as well as teased the possibility of 3D printing a whole rocket.

The pitch worked – almost immediately. Ellis tells CNBC Make It, 31-year-old Ellis: “We had half a billion dollars commitment within a few minutes of cold emailing Mark Cuban.”

Ellis, who is currently the CEO and co-founder of Relativity Space in Los Angeles, is months away the launch of the first 3D printed rocket into orbit. Along the way, Ellis and his co-founder Jordan Noone – who interned with Ellis at Blue Origin before landing an engineering job at SpaceX – have raised more than $1.3 billionInvestors like BlackRock or Tiger Global.

Relativity Space was valued at $4.2Billion. The money also helped fund its mission to 3D print rockets in order to enter a competitive private sector. over $1 trillionThe decade will be over.

Ellis began his passion for rockets early. He studied at the University of Southern California’s Rocket Propulsion Lab. Ellis also did three years of summer internships with Blue Origin. In 2004, Ellis was offered a full-time position as an engineer at Bezos.

Blue Origin was Ellis’ first venture into 3D printing rocket parts. He became intrigued by the concept of using huge-sized 3D printers in order to make entire rockets. He thought it could lower costs and open the door to other possibilities, such as the possibility of creating a new type of rocket. multiplanetary societyElon Musk is the SpaceX CEO.

Ellis says that he realized that for the future of Mars, somebody had to start a business that would build an industrial base. A small factory, which can easily be launched from Earth on a rocket and that is able to build many products requires very little human effort.

Ellis realized that it might be him. Noone, Ellis and Noone claim they have the world’s biggest metal 3D printer. 24-foot-tall Stargate — and used it to build their first 3D-printed rocket, called the Terran 1. This month Ellis told Florida Today that the Terran 1 is on trackLaunch from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station to conduct its first space flight in the future.

“I now realize a lot more of what I was made fun for.” [while] growing up – whether it was researching every topic under the sun, and following all of these threads, and being hyper-curious, and pattern-matching information – all of those skills have let me scale and run Relativity,” Ellis says.

Watch the video to see how Ellis transformed Relativity Space from a $22 billion startup into one that can compete with Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos.

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