Stoke Space

The bet on full reusability

SpaceX proved that recovering and reflying a rocket's first stage collapses the cost of reaching orbit. But on every operational rocket flying today, the upper stage — the most expensive, most propellant-hungry part of the vehicle — is still thrown away on each mission. Stoke Space exists to close that last gap. From its 2019 founding the company set out to build a launch vehicle in which every piece comes home: a reusable first stage, a reusable second stage, and even a reusable payload fairing.

That is a harder problem than reusing a booster. A second stage returns from orbital velocity, so it must survive the punishing heat of reentry and then land intact — and do it cheaply enough, and often enough, that reuse actually pays. Stoke's wager is that solving upper-stage reusability is the thing that turns launch from a scarce, bespoke service into something closer to airline-style operations. If it works, Nova would be one of very few vehicles ever built for that from a clean sheet, which is why a still-pre-flight company sits among the more closely watched names in the new launch cohort.

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From Blue Origin to a clean-sheet rocket

Stoke was founded in 2019 by Andy Lapsa and Tom Feldman, both former Blue Origin propulsion engineers, and is headquartered in Kent, Washington with a test site at Moses Lake. The company grew up inside the startup ecosystem — it went through Y Combinator's Winter 2020 batch — rather than out of a legacy prime, and has scaled to roughly 400 employees as it moves from development into flight hardware.

Its engineering has advanced in visible, incremental steps rather than a single leap. In 2023 Stoke flew Hopper2, a full-scale reusable upper-stage prototype, demonstrating vertical takeoff, differential-thrust steering, and a propulsive landing. In 2024 it hotfired Zenith, the full-flow staged-combustion engine for Nova's first stage, and secured the license to rebuild historic Space Launch Complex 14 at Cape Canaveral. Each milestone retired a specific piece of technical risk on the path to a vehicle that has to work end to end before reuse matters.

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Nova and the reusable second stage

Nova is a two-stage medium-lift rocket. Its first stage is powered by seven Zenith engines burning liquid methane and oxygen in a full-flow staged-combustion cycle — the same high-efficiency, hard-to-build cycle used by SpaceX's Raptor — each producing over 100,000 pounds of thrust. Nova is designed to carry roughly 3,000 kg to low Earth orbit in fully reusable mode and up to about 7,000 kg when expended, with around 2,500 kg to geostationary transfer orbit.

The company's signature innovation is the upper stage. Rather than bolting a heavy ablative or tiled heat shield onto the vehicle, Stoke's Andromeda design wraps a ring of 24 3D-printed hydrogen-oxygen thruster chambers around a regeneratively cooled metallic heat shield. The same liquid that feeds the engine also actively cools the shield during reentry — a trick borrowed from how rocket combustion chambers already survive extreme heat. The goal is a second stage that comes back from orbit and is ready to fly again without inspections or refurbishment between flights, which is the whole point: a reusable stage that needs a rebuild every flight saves little money.

In early June 2026 Stoke completed proto-qualification of Nova's first stage at Moses Lake, running the seven-engine flight article through 46 structural verification tests — pressurizing both tanks above maximum expected operating conditions and holding up through hurricane-force winds and lightning — alongside fluid, avionics, and ground-support checks.

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A war chest and a seat at the national-security table

Stoke has raised roughly $1.34 billion to date, a large sum for a company that has not yet reached orbit. After a $9.1M seed in 2021, it stacked a $65M Series A, a $100M Series B, and a $260M Series C, then closed an initial $510M Series D (plus a $100M debt facility) in late 2025 and extended that round to $860M in early 2026. Backers span deep-tech and climate investors including Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Y Combinator, Point72 Ventures, and the US Innovative Technology Fund.

Capital alone does not make a launch company credible; customers and government confidence do. In 2025 the U.S. Space Force selected Stoke for the National Security Space Launch Phase 3 Lane 1 pool, making it eligible to compete for national-security launch task orders against a ceiling of about $5.6 billion through mid-2029, with an initial task order for capabilities assessment and mission assurance. In July 2026 NASA added its own vote of confidence, selecting Stoke for a Space Technology Mission Directorate collaboration with Ames Research Center to mature the reusable upper stage's entry, descent, and landing technologies — building on a 2020 SBIR award that seeded the Andromeda heat-shield concept.

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Revenue before first flight

Because Nova has not flown, Stoke's launch business is still a forward-looking manifest of contracted missions rather than realized revenue, supplemented by government development and national-security funding. To generate income and monetize its internal engineering muscle in the meantime, the company has spun out Boltline, a cloud-based hardware-engineering software platform commercialized from its own tooling and sold across aerospace, defense, climate tech, biotech, and advanced manufacturing.

Boltline is a modest but telling piece of the picture: Stoke reported roughly doubling its software revenue in the first half of a fiscal year, a sign the company is willing to build durable products beyond the rocket itself. Still, the overwhelming majority of Stoke's value rests on Nova reaching orbit and proving rapid reuse — the software line is a bridge, not the business.

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What to watch

The single most important event on Stoke's horizon is Nova's first orbital flight, targeted for no earlier than late 2026. By July 2026 the pieces are converging: the first stage has cleared proto-qualification, flight-configuration Zenith engines are in test, and the rebuild of Launch Complex 14 at Cape Canaveral is essentially complete — its umbilical tower repainted a vibrant red as a nod to the pad's Mercury-era history. The remaining work is full-duration stage testing, second-stage qualification, and integration.

Beyond first flight, the harder proof is operational: Stoke has to demonstrate that Nova's reusable architecture — and especially its actively cooled upper stage — can turn around quickly and cheaply, mission after mission, the way its thesis promises. Success would validate a fundamentally different path to full reusability than SpaceX's Starship; a slow or troubled debut would test how much of the company's $1.34 billion and national-security standing were priced on a rocket that had yet to leave the ground. The addition of former OpenAI product chief Kevin Weil to the board in July 2026 signals ambitions to scale like a technology company once the vehicle is flying.

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