Anika Begay
Stoke Space is nothing if not ambitious. The five-year-old launch startup has generated a lot of buzz for its bold plans to develop the first fully reusable rocket, with both the booster and second stage returning vertically to Earth.
Those plans got a major boost a year ago when the U.S. Space Force awarded Stoke and three other startups valuable launch real estate at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. Stoke plans to redevelop the historic Launch Complex 14, which hosted John Glenn’s historic mission and other NASA programs, in time for its first launch in 2025.
At the heart of Stoke’s plans is Nova, a two-stage rocket designed so that both the booster and the second stage return to Earth and land vertically. The only other rocket in development that aims for complete reuse is SpaceX’s Starship. According to Stoke, their reusable upper stage will unlock incredible possibilities, such as the ability to return cargo from orbit, land anywhere on Earth, and lower launch costs by an order of magnitude.
Before any of this can happen, the Space Force must complete its own “environmental assessment” of the company’s plans at LC-14, to assess how repeated launches will affect local flora and fauna. These assessments are required by federal law and can often take months, but the upside is that they provide a closer look at a company’s operational plans.
Stoke’s goals are bold, but the draft environmental assessment for Stoke’s launch pad shows that it would be a mistake to expect a return test of the booster on its first flight. In fact, the environmental assessment doesn’t consider reusable operations at all, only missions with the 132-foot-tall Nova flying in a fully expendable configuration. The document, released last month, calls this Stoke’s “phased program approach.” Phase 1 calls for using a fully expendable vehicle at a relatively low launch rate. Phase 2, which would require additional environmental analysis and isn’t considered in this draft document, would involve the fully reusable rocket.
To start, Stoke is seeking approval to conduct about two launches next year, its first year of operations, and then told regulators he plans a maximum launch rate of 10 launches per year. Stoke told regulators that Nova will be able to carry up to 7,000 kilograms into low Earth orbit, the rocket’s maximum payload capacity when not reused.
A person familiar with Stoke’s plans said the company has no intention of developing the reusable aspects of Nova until it has successfully demonstrated the ability to routinely deploy payloads into planned orbits, and that this phased approach has always been part of the internal roadmap.
A phased approach is not unusual: SpaceX, the global launch linchpin, first launched its Falcon 9 rocket in 2010 but didn’t bring the booster back to Earth until 2015. Stoke is clearly looking to take a similar path, although the draft document doesn’t propose a date for when the company might begin testing its reusable technology.
While it’s still too early to say when reusable flights might begin at the Cape, Stoke has been busy conducting its own second-stage “hop” campaigns at its facilities in Washington State. Stoke CEO Andy Lapsa said in a recent podcast appearance that the company started developing Nova’s second stage first because there wasn’t a playbook on second-stage reuse; but because the rocket stage design is so tightly coupled, they had to understand the parameters of the second stage to begin designing the booster.
“The entire vehicle, from an engineering standpoint, has to be designed with the end state in mind,” he said. “It has to be designed for that. Everything we’ve done from the founding to today is take that end state and build for that end state architecture.”
Once the reusable technology is fully developed, the Space Force will need to conduct a supplemental environmental analysis. At that point, the supplemental EA will consider the environmental impacts of landing in a landing zone near the launch pad, landing on an offshore barge, or some other location. Depending on the complexity of the changes to the original analysis, this process could take six months or more.
But Stoke will be ready to move into that second phase, Lapsa said on the podcast: “The millisecond we hit orbit, our focus shifts completely to, okay, now let’s prove we can come back down. Once we prove we can come back down […] then a millisecond later, we start focusing on reuse.”
