Stoke Space raises $1 billion in new investment capital; announces new rocket plans
Click for original graphic.
The American rocket startup Stoke Space announced today that it has raised another billion in new investment capital, bringing its total capital raised to $2.3 billion.
Stoke Space Technologies, Inc. the rocket company developing fully and rapidly reusable launch vehicles, announced today that it has completed an initial closing of its billion-dollar Series E financing round. This funding brings Stoke’s total capital raised to $2.3 billion and will support the company as it prepares for its first orbital launch, expands production and launch capacity, and accelerates development of its larger Nova Block 2 launch vehicle.
The round was co-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 other new and existing investors. [emphasis mine]
The highlighted phrase above is also news, as it is the first mention the company has made of a new upgraded version of its Nova rocket, with the first version now dubbed Nova Pathfinder and the upgrade Nova Block 2. The graphic to the right, from a second press release issued today that outlines in detail the upgrade, compares the two rockets, while providing the company’s first detailed flight schedule.
Our immediate focus is flying Pathfinder. We plan to fly multiple Pathfinder missions in 2027 and 2028, giving us a growing body of flight data while we build and test Nova in parallel. Block 2’s first flight is scheduled for 2029.
… Pathfinder’s role does not necessarily end when the larger vehicle arrives. We see value in having more than one way to serve the market, since some missions are particularly well suited to the Pathfinder configuration. Its longer-term flight cadence will be informed by what we learn over the next two years and by the needs of our customers.
The company’s second release also goes into great detail about the rising demand for rockets combined with the general shortage, and outlines how these two rockets are designed to address both. In a sense, Stoke is setting itself up to grab the small satellite market that SpaceX right now dominates with its Falcon 9 and appears to be moving away from as it develops Starship.
Hat tip reader Nate P.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The print edition can be purchased at Amazon or from any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
The Nova name is a blast from the past. It was a heavy lift proposed about the same time as Saturn. Ultimately the Saturn family was selected for Apollo. Mostly a paper design with no hardware cut that I can find. Good luck to Spoke Space. Cheers –
I have only good things to say about Stoke.
Our own (foul-mouthed) David called them a rip-off of Elon in the comments section here:
https://www.thespacereview.com/article/5301/1
Maybe he’d like to explain his beef with Phil Bono, as a legacy engineer (horrors!)
Yeah, that was definitely coloring outside the lines. David is maybe a bit more chauvinistic in his admiration for SpaceX and Elon than I am, but Stoke is hardly a “rip-off” of either. And the Nova’s, both Pathfinder, as it has now been dubbed, and Block 2, have as much that is Bono-ish about them as Elon-ish. I can defend David only by observing that, given how much excrement he gets from your fellow rocket engineering nostalgists over at The Space Review, the wonder is that he doesn’t intemperately pop off far more than he does.
I think nostalgists is sugar coating it. Revisionist lying etc on the part of at least two of them. Not that I can justify the extreme view of David, though i don’t see it as being vindictive as his opponents. I hardly ever sign in over there to comment so I see some seriously deluded comments there.
This is not a good place to respond as neither of them come here that I know of. Starliner comparable with Dragon???? Rich can only keep their money because we allow it?????
My nostalgia is more for concepts that never got explored, either due to politics or Falcon being so successful that alternatives never get looked at.
If Elon perfected winged fly-back boosters…I’d be pining for boostback.
Dwayne Day, when not dumping on atomic propulsion, chronicles has-been spysats, while Byeman writes about outhouses.
Most concerning to me are the globalists and the bloody lawyers at The Space Review.
There is only one binding agreement that nations should commit themselves to….were I Doctor Doom at the UN.
I’d have Europe commit to winged spaceflight, Japan build pressure-feds, Australia build gun-launch, etc.
Each nation would be assigned different forms of spaceflight and fund them all properly.
Jeff Wright,
“Each nation would be assigned different forms of spaceflight and fund them all properly.”
Correct me if I’m wrong, but: you would prefer a system that forces people to work on forms of spaceflight that does not inspire them, but at least you would fund them all to the level that you believe to be proper, from taxes, forcing the populace to fund uninspired engineering. Do I understand that correctly?
Don’t you suppose that a better method is for each engineering team, no matter their country, to work on the form of spaceflight that excites them, the form that they would gladly spend extra effort to make work well, for the least cost and at the highest cadence that they can? Wouldn’t it be better if these teams worked so well on their ideas that, rather than depend upon taxpayer funding, they could convince private capitalists to fund them all to the level that the engineers and the venture capitalists believe to be proper?
Isn’t that what we have now?
Haven’t all these many, various, and existing engineering teams tried a wide variety of forms of spaceflight, including winged spacecraft (e.g. NASA’s Shuttle, Sierra Space’s Dream Chaser), air launch (e.g. Orbital Science’s Pegasus, Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo, Virgin Orbit’s LauncherOne), boostback (e.g. SpaceX’s Falcon and Super Heavy, at least one Chinese rocket), single stage to orbit (e.g. Lockheed Martin’s VentureStar, McDonnell Douglass’s DC-X Delta Clipper), powered landing (e.g. Blue Origin’s New Shepard and New Glenn, SpaceX’s Falcons), aerial catch (e.g. SpaceX’s Super Heavy and soon Starship, one of the Chinese rockets)? And those are just the ones that have already flown, even if only as developmental test flights.
What about the soon to fly innovative rockets? Rocket Lab’s Neutron will do a Hungry Hungry Hippo release of its upper stage while holding on to its nosecone fairings (actually, that is more regurgitation than hungry-hungry ingestion). Stoke Space has a rather unique upper stage propulsion system and is trying a different reentry system.
Whew! What a variety of systems and methods we get when we let eight billion people loose to do engineering as they please rather than have one central planner tell them what to do and how to do it. We get to see the advantages and disadvantages of each system and of each method, and we find which ones can be made most economical, most available, and most reliable. We end up with a variety of systems and can choose the one(s) that are most appropriate for the spacecraft that we want launched.
And we can extend this same philosophy to the spacecraft themselves, letting many different engineering teams make a variety of spacecraft or space stations so that the best ones can be determined and duplicated for even more customers.
I am somewhat confused how you have nostalgia for concepts that never happened, because a team has to think it is a good idea and a financier has to also think it is a good idea for it to happen. You may think that it is politics for people to fail to think an idea is good, but it is actually due diligence. The engineering team has to be convinced that it is worth their irreplaceable time, that they have a chance to make it work and that their efforts will make the world a better place, and the financier likewise has to be convinced that he is not wasting his valuable funds, that he is likely to benefit enough more than he risks in order to make the risk worth the effort and time.
Why would anyone look at alternatives that are not as good as Falcon? Shouldn’t they look at alternatives that improve on the Falcons? New Glenn is already flying, and Neutron is about to fly. Our host posted this partly because Stoke Space has announced their own new alternative that should compete directly with the Falcons.
You have heard of defense in depth….same here.
Humans fly with winged craft, bulk by boostback, water via gun-launch.
We didn’t win WWII with only tanks, but with ships, planes, etc.
Here is where diversity isn’t a bad word.
Take a look at jet airliners. Design converges on the optimum.
I’m not getting a horse to provide diversity from truck transportation.
Horse? No. Mules are what you need if a truck can’t handle things
15 tons to LEO seems like a good target. Not quite what Falcon 9 manages, but a good mainstream capacity. Will be good for the market if they manage it. We don’t have any real way to predict their flight cadence yet but in theory with a fully reusable rocket is should be higher than any current provider in that space except SpaceX.
And just in case there is any confusion, I’m not the David commenting over at thespacereview.
I was debating this with some people today. It doesn’t matter if you can get a lot of mass to orbit in a single launch if you’re trying to build a real economy, versus something purely consumptive or recreational. Settlements and outposts on the Moon or Mars, factories in orbit, asteroid mining, et al. cannot function with one launch every few years. Real competition for SpaceX should also force a general lowering of launch prices, benefiting customers with smaller budgets or more marginal business models. Here’s to Stoke not only finishing both versions of Nova, but flying them regularly and affordably.
How does that second stage work?
Is it reusable?
It is reusable, yes, and it is designed to work in a similar fashion to the pathfinder second stage. Base-first reentry using active cooling to protect the heat shield.
It is interesting – and a bit odd, frankly – that the Nova 2 drawing shows a ring of struts separating the stages to allow hot-staging when the Nova Pathfinder already incorporates a dodge around having to put extra armor on the upper dome of the 1st stage by just having the 2nd stage nozzles outboard of the 1st stage circumference. Seems to me that approach could have been preserved for Nova 2 with the extra diameter of the 2nd stage’s base also providing more “shade” to the 2nd stage’s hull from the re-entry plasma stream than the strictly cylindrical configuration. I wonder why the more conventional approach was taken for the larger vehicle.
Me too. Seems a radical departure from the first effort. How do you shield the cylindrical stage for re entry
You need a wide base for that to work.
Maybe they will have an annular LOFTID ring surrounding the engine compartment.
Perhaps that could aid boostback with exhaust products between the inflatable and the atmosphere it is running into?
That or they will just have plug-nozzles for LEO only.
I don’t think we know what the perfect RLV looks like just yet. I’d love to see different approaches fleshed out—but it could be that Falcon is as good as it gets.
Jeff: you do not need a base wider than the top for this to work (though it is a significant challenge). They won’t use LOFTID, And F9 is definitely not as good as it gets.
Dick: they took the more conventional approach because it means they’re less volume-limited.
Mike: it’s still shielded. The vehicle’s reentry geometry and the actively cooled heat shield are intended to protect the craft from peak heat flux.