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Stoke Space is building fully reusable rockets that it will use to launch satellites and government payloads into orbit.
Stoke Space is a rocket company betting that the future of spaceflight is total reusability. Most rockets today are thrown away after each launch, with only small pieces recovered. Stoke wants both the booster and the upper stage of its rocket, called Nova, to fly back to Earth and land safely so they can be refueled and flown again. That turns a rocket into something closer to an airliner than a firework.
The company sells launches themselves. Who pays? Satellite operators and government customers, like the U.S. Space Force, which wants fast, responsive access to orbit. The pitch is price and speed: if a rocket second stage can be reused, the cost of each launch drops and the turnaround time between missions shrinks. Stoke's first stage uses a cluster of engines and the second stage uses a novel metallic heat shield and a ring of small thrusters to control its descent, which is the hard engineering problem the company is trying to solve. Stoke is private, so its money comes from investors rather than stock buyers. It has raised venture funding to develop the rocket, build test hardware, and run engine firings at its facilities. The company is headquartered in Kent, Washington, near Seattle, which puts it in the middle of a growing cluster of aerospace talent and suppliers.
Competition is crowded. SpaceX dominates reusable launch with Falcon 9, and it is a formidable rival because it already flies routinely and lands boosters. Rocket Lab sells smaller launches and is developing its own reusable medium rocket, Neutron, while Blue Origin is building large reusable vehicles too. Stoke's bet is that a fully reusable, quickly repairable rocket can carve out a niche for responsive defense and commercial missions, but the gap between a working first launch and a reliable, profitable reusable service is where many rocket companies have stumbled.
Saved answer · last researched 15 Nov 2026