Stoke Space raises $1B to expand its footprint and upsize its fully reusable Nova rocket

Stoke Space says it has raised roughly $1 billion to get ready for the first launch of its fully reusable Nova rocket — and to scale up the rocket’s design for even bigger payloads. To accommodate its grander ambitions, the Kent, Wash.-based startup is also scaling up its rocket test facility in Moses Lake, 175 miles to the east.

Lapsa said that scaling up the Nova rocket’s design was always part of Stoke Space’s game plan, but that the timeline is being accelerated in response to the growing demand for launches and the shrinking availability of launch opportunities . The timing of Stoke’s pivot to a bigger launch vehicle wasn’t sparked by a single event, Lapsa said. “The pressure has been growing over the last couple of years,” he said. “It certainly hasn’t slowed down recently.”

The revised plan calls for Stoke to begin launching missions with the initially designed rocket, now known as Nova Pathfinder. Pathfinder’s first stage will be powered by seven of Stoke’s Zenith engines , and the upper stage’s Andromeda engine will have a ring of 24 thrust chambers integrated into an actively cooled metallic heat shield. The rocket will be capable of putting 3 metric tons of payload into low Earth orbit, or LEO. Pathfinder’s first launch is now scheduled for early 2027 — a slight slip from earlier expectations. It will carry a spacecraft for AstroForge , a California-based asteroid mining company.

The super-sized version of Stoke’s rocket, known as Nova Block 2, is due to make its debut in 2029. Its first stage will have twice as many Zenith engines as Pathfinder. Its upper stage will have 12 independent engines, each with two thrust chambers. That will increase Nova’s lift capability by a factor of five, enabling up to 15 metric tons of payload to be delivered to LEO. More than 4 tons can be sent to geosynchronous transfer orbit , or GTO. In comparison, SpaceX says its partially reusable Falcon 9 rocket can deliver 18.5 tons to LEO or 5.5 tons to GTO in reusable mode .

Both versions of the Nova rocket are designed to be fully reusable, with the first-stage booster flying itself down to a recovery ship and the upper stage making a separate re-entry. Stoke is only the second company in the space industry to pursue that strategy. SpaceX has designed its Starship launch system for dual-stage reusability but hasn’t yet reached that goal. Stoke is developing an active-cooling system for upper-stage reusability. Some of the rocket’s cryogenically cooled liquid hydrogen propellant is circulated through channels in the upper stage’s metallic heat shield to absorb the intense heat of atmospheric re-entry. SpaceX has been experimenting with different heat shield strategies for Starship, but some experts have expressed doubts about SpaceX’s approach .