Stoke Space Technologies, a company nearing the first flight of a fully reusable launch vehicle, has raised $1 billion to help accelerate work on a larger rocket.
The company announced Sept. 8 that it completed an initial close of a Series E round led by Point72 Ventures and Spark Capital, with participation from General Innovation, Glade Brook Capital, US Innovation Technology, Washington Harbour Partners, Woven Capital, Y Combinator and others.
Stoke Space did not disclose its valuation from the new round, but the company has now raised $2.3 billion to date, more than $1.8 billion of that in the last year. Stoke Space raised $510 million in a Series D round last October and extended that round by $350 million in February.
The company is working on a launch vehicle that had been known as Nova, whose lower and upper stages are designed to be reusable. That vehicle, capable of placing several tons into orbit, is slated for a first flight in early 2027 from Cape Canaveral, Florida.
As part of the funding round announcement, Stoke Space announced that it is working on a larger reusable vehicle, called Nova Block 2. It is designed to place 15 metric tons into low Earth orbit with a payload fairing 5 meters in diameter, with a first flight planned for 2029.
“What we’ve seen in the last year is an explosion in demand for more capable and higher quantities of satellites,” said Andy Lapsa, chief executive of Stoke Space, in an interview. “We think that we can fly at rate and fly full payloads at the 15-ton capacity.”
Nova Block 2 will leverage technologies developed for the original Nova rocket, now called Nova Pathfinder. That includes Zenith, the liquid-methane/liquid-oxygen engine Stoke Space developed for the first stage. Nova Pathfinder will use seven Zenith engines, while the larger Block 2 will use 14. Lapsa said there will be a block upgrade of the Zenith engine, part of what he called a “natural evolution” of the engine to mature its design.
The upper stage of Nova Block 2 will also use a version of Andromeda, the liquid-hydrogen/liquid-oxygen engine developed for Nova Pathfinder’s upper stage, but with design changes to provide improved performance without having to develop larger turbomachinery. While the upper stage of Nova Pathfinder has a distinct tapered shape, like a capsule, to reduce heating on the sides during the stage’s reentry, Nova Block 2 features a more traditional cylindrical shape that will use more active cooling during reentry.
That redesigned upper stage will be able to support a 5-meter payload fairing, a choice Lapsa said is intended to best serve customers who have designed satellites for similar payload volumes.
“A lot of commercial companies optimize their satellites around the payload volumes that exist in the market,” he said. “The government a long time ago defined this 5-meter fairing as a de facto standard, and it’s important that we can serve all of the customers who’ve designed around that packaging.”
The first flights of Nova Pathfinder will provide insights to aid the design of the Block 2 upper stage and other elements of the vehicle. The company is planning “multiple” flights of Pathfinder in 2027 and 2028 before Block 2 debuts in 2029.
Lapsa said the first Nova Pathfinder is “very close” to shipping to the company’s Cape Canaveral launch site. The company is testing engines almost every day and completed structural testing of the vehicle in June. The company is preparing a static-fire test of the second stage at its test site in Moses Lake, Washington, after which it will go to Florida.
The first stage will go to Cape Canaveral for wet dress rehearsals and a static-fire test on the launch pad. Once those tests are complete, he said, “we’ll put the second stage on top and then go fly.”
The new funding round will also go toward expanding Stoke Space’s test and production facilities. “What we will invest in is manufacturing at a higher rate or scale than what we’re doing today,” he said. That includes expanding the Moses Lake site from 75 to 550 acres for faster testing. The company is also building a new payload processing facility at Cape Canaveral that can handle payloads for both Nova versions.
While the original Nova design is now called Pathfinder, Lapsa said the company may continue to fly it after the larger Block 2 enters service. “We will continue to build the Pathfinder vehicle and then allow the forces of the market determine how much we scale.”
The forces of the market are, in general, seeking more supply of launch vehicles given both rising demand and industry concerns that the field’s current workhorse, SpaceX’s Falcon 9, may start winding down operations in the next few years as the company shifts to its Starship vehicle. While Starship is much larger and designed to fly more frequently, much of its launch capacity may be taken up by SpaceX itself for Starlink and orbital data center satellites.
“This industry will scale exactly as fast as rockets leave the pad. It cannot scale faster than that,” Lapsa said. “What’s really important is that we have a diverse ecosystem, a diverse economy in space, so that we have healthy competition.”
“I think the scale of the space economy will be exactly as large as the number of rockets flying, and particularly the number of rockets flying for third-party customers,” he added. “That’s a really important concept to understand, and that number has not been growing over the last few years.”
