About Stoke Space
Stoke Space was founded in 2019 by Andy Lapsa and Tom Feldman, both former Blue Origin engineers, based on the observation that while SpaceX had achieved significant success reusing the first stage (booster) of its Falcon 9 rocket, the upper stage of virtually every orbital rocket, including Falcon 9, has historically been discarded after each launch, representing a substantial ongoing cost and manufacturing burden even for otherwise reusable rocket systems, since building an entirely new upper stage for every single launch remains expensive and time-consuming even when the more complex and expensive first-stage booster can be reused many times.
Stoke Space has focused its core engineering effort specifically on solving the technically difficult challenge of making a rocket's upper stage fully reusable, including surviving the extreme heat of atmospheric reentry, which the upper stage experiences at higher speeds and more challenging trajectories than a first-stage booster typically encounters during its more limited return to Earth, developing a novel actively cooled metallic heat shield design intended to protect the upper stage during reentry without the ablative heat shield materials, which burn away and cannot be reused, that some other reentry vehicles have historically relied upon. The company's Nova rocket, its first orbital launch vehicle under active development, is designed around this fully reusable two-stage architecture from the outset, an ambitious technical goal that, if successfully achieved, could offer significant cost advantages by eliminating the need to manufacture an entirely new upper stage for every single orbital launch, a manufacturing cost that remains a meaningful expense even for companies like SpaceX that have already achieved reusability for their first-stage boosters. Stoke Space has secured contracts and support from government customers including the U.S. Space Force and NASA, alongside significant private venture funding to support its ambitious reusable rocket development program. The company has raised substantial venture funding from investors including Y Combinator, Point72 Ventures, and Sparta Group, positioning itself among the more technically ambitious new entrants in the competitive launch vehicle industry.
