Stoke Space: The Quiet Bet on a Fully Reusable Second Stage
Most reusable rockets recover only the first stage. Stoke is building Nova — a vehicle that returns the entire rocket. Inside the technology and the team.
Falcon 9 reuses the first stage. Starship is being designed to reuse both. Stoke Space took a less traveled path: build a smaller fully reusable rocket from day one, with a second stage that returns under its own propulsion using a metallic regenerative heat shield. Their Hopper2 vehicle has demonstrated key elements of the design in flight.
Why fully reuse the second stage?
In a partially reusable rocket, the second stage is thrown away every flight — the most expensive single piece of the system. Recovering it requires solving the heat shield problem and adding mass for landing legs and propellant. Stoke is betting that solving these problems pays off in operations cost.
The metallic heat shield
Stoke's second stage has a hydrogen-cooled metallic aeroshell — meaning the same liquid hydrogen that powers the engines flows through channels in the heat shield, absorbing heat during reentry. The heat shield doubles as a regenerative cooling structure, replacing tiles and ablators with a single robust component.
- Founded
- 2019 by Andy Lapsa and Tom Feldman
- HQ
- Kent, Washington
- Hopper2 hop test
- Successful 30-second flight, 2023
- First orbital launch site
- Cape Canaveral SLC-14
- Engine
- Zenith first-stage engines, methalox; second-stage uses 30 small thrusters in a ring
Why a ring of small engines on the second stage?
- Differential throttling provides attitude control during landing without complex gimbals.
- Small engines provide redundancy — losing one is not catastrophic.
- Plumes are directed inward through the heat shield aperture, integrating cooling and propulsion.
Where in the development
Stoke completed its first orbital flight integration milestones in 2025 and is targeting its first orbital flight in the late 2020s. The company has won a US Space Force contract for the Apex test program and raised significant venture funding.
Frequently asked questions
How big is Stoke's rocket?
About 100 ft tall and 3.6 m diameter. It is sized for the medium-lift constellation market with a unique fully reusable architecture.
What is Stoke's first customer?
Stoke has US Space Force contracts and several commercial customer agreements. The first orbital flight is being prepared with a primary technology demo payload.
What does the name mean?
"Stoke" is fuel-stoking and engineering-vibe. The company's mantra is "stoke the fire" — keep iterating, keep learning.
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