Remember Stoke Space? They developed a novel way of making a rocket's stages steerable that depended on regulating the fuel flow to the engines on a ring, so that instead of moving the engine bells in angles to the vertical, the engines are fixed and the fuel flow is varied.
Shown here are the upper stage engines of their first test vehicle, named Hopper 2, which flew in September of 2023. The difference between this ring and a conventional array of engines steered by changing the directions they point kinda jumps off the page at you. There are no engine bells, just spots on the ring that appears to be flat. Above each plume you can make out what appears to be the rest of the engine.
The Kent, Washington-based company just raised $1 billion via its"Series E" capital campaign, bringing Stoke’s total investor haul to $2.3 billion. The Sept. 8 announcement provided a development update for Stoke’s fully reusable Nova Pathfinder launch vehicle and included plans for its never-before-seen Nova Block 2 rocket, a more powerful system designed to be able to deliver up to 15 tons to low Earth orbit (LEO).
Stoke is actively developing two launch vehicles: the Nova Pathfinder and Nova Block 2. Pathfinder will be the first one to be test flown and results from the testing figures to be incorporated into Nova Block 2.
The initial version of Nova is planned to have a lift capacity of 3 metric tons in fully reusable mode and up to 7 tons in a fully expendable configuration. The rocket’s first stage is powered by seven Zenith engines, with a combined thrust of 700,000 pounds. The novel upper stage features a ring of 24 thrusters that surround a regeneratively cooled heat shield to protect the rocket during reentry into Earth’s atmosphere.
After completing an extensive set of structural tests earlier this summer on the first stage, CEO Andy Lapsa said Stoke will ship this stage “pretty soon” to the company’s launch site at Cape Canaveral, Florida. After additional testing there, the vehicle will undergo a static fire test before being mated with the upper stage.
Nova Pathfinder upper stage flight article 1. (Image credit: Stoke Space)
The upper stage will soon be shipped to Stoke’s test site at Moses Lake, Washington, for its own set of structural tests, followed by a hot fire test. Then the upper stage will also be shipped to Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.
For the first time since Stoke was founded in 2020, Lapsa publicly put out a target launch date for Nova, saying the company is aiming for “early” 2027 to launch. Of course, he is fully aware that problems can, and often do, occur during stage testing and final integration of the vehicles.
“I feel good about that launch date,” he said. “I think that’s pretty realistic. But as you know, in our industry, we’ll go when we’re ready.”
The Block 2 version of the Nova rocket will use their methane-liquid-oxygen-fueled Zenith engines although there will be more of them. The upper stage will similarly use hydrogen and liquid oxygen for propellant. Probably the biggest change in the Block 2 version is that it gets rid of that triangular shape for the upper stage and goes over to the much more prevalent cylindrical shapes
Stoke is targeting 2029 for the first launches of the Block 2 Nova rockets.
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