NASA picks Eric Schmidt’s rocket company for Mars mission, setting up a race with SpaceX
Relativity Space—a rocket maker acquired by former Google executive chair Eric Schmidt last year after stumbling on the path to orbit—might just beat SpaceX to Mars. On Tuesday, NASA said it hired the company to build a spacecraft to house a suite of scientific instruments, launch it into space, and fly it to Mars. The structure of the contract is akin to the deals that NASA made with SpaceX to fly cargo to the International Space Station, or Firefly Aerospace to put a lander on the Moon.
- ▪Relativity Space—a rocket maker acquired by former Google executive chair Eric Schmidt last year after stumbling on the path to orbit—might just beat SpaceX to Mars.
- ▪On Tuesday, NASA said it hired the company to build a spacecraft to house a suite of scientific instruments, launch it into space, and fly it to Mars.
- ▪The structure of the contract is akin to the deals that NASA made with SpaceX to fly cargo to the International Space Station, or Firefly Aerospace to put a lander on the Moon.
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Record
| Original publisher | TechCrunch |
| Canonical URL | https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/17/nasa-picks-eric-schmidts-rocket-company-for-mars-mission-setting-up-a-race-with-spacex/ |
| Publication time | Thu, 18 Jun 2026 06:26:24 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-06-18T06:28:04.501Z |
| Last seen | 2026-06-18T08:05:36.112Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | M99VGxQlBRoK |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Relativity Space—a rocket maker acquired by former Google executive chair Eric Schmidt last year after stumbling on the path to orbit—might just beat SpaceX to Mars. On Tuesday, NASA said it hired the company to build a spacecraft to house a suite of scientific instruments, launch it into space, and fly it to Mars. The structure of the contract is akin to the deals that NASA made with SpaceX to fly cargo to the International Space Station, or Firefly Aerospace to put a lander on the Moon. The government agency handles the science, while the private company provides low-cost infrastructure.
…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at TechCrunch.
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