The Kent startup is refurbishing John Glenn's historic launch pad as it pursues something no one else has managed: bringing the entire rocket home.
When Stoke Space Technologies engineers look across Cape Canaveral's Launch Complex 14, they're not just seeing cranes and propellant lines. They're seeing the pad where John Glenn became the first American to orbit Earth in 1962—and, if all goes according to plan, where their Nova rocket will attempt something arguably harder than anything Glenn did: coming back to Earth intact. All of it. Both stages.
The Kent, Washington-based startup disclosed Monday it has extended its Series D round to $860 million, tacking on $350 million to the $510 million it announced last October. That brings Stoke's total capital raised to $1.34 billion—a war chest sized for what may be the most technically audacious bet in commercial spaceflight right now.
The company isn't naming the new investors joining this extension, which closed February 10. But the original Series D, finalized last fall, was led by Thomas Tull's U.S. Innovative Technology Fund and drew fresh money from Washington Harbour Partners and General Innovation Capital Partners. Returning backers including Breakthrough Energy Ventures, 776 (Ashton Kutcher and Alex Ohanian's fund), and Toyota Ventures stayed in. Silicon Valley Bank threw in a $100 million debt facility alongside the equity.
The Problem Everyone Else Gave Up On
SpaceX revolutionized launch economics by landing first stages. Rocket Lab catches them with helicopters. Blue Origin's New Glenn will soon try its hand at booster recovery. But the second stage—the part that actually reaches orbit—has remained stubbornly disposable across the entire industry.
There's a reason for that. By the time an upper stage completes its mission, it's moving at roughly 17,500 miles per hour and sitting a few hundred miles above Earth. Slowing down enough to survive reentry means carrying extra propellant, which cuts into payload capacity. The heat shield adds weight. The landing systems add complexity. Most launch providers have concluded it's not worth the trade-offs.
Stoke thinks they're wrong.
Nova is designed for 100% reusability—both stages, every flight. The upper stage uses hydrogen and oxygen, a propellant combination that produces predominantly water vapor and positions the vehicle as about as clean as rocketry gets. (Though "clean" remains a relative term in an industry that involves controlled explosions.) The first stage leans on seven methane-oxygen engines, each cranking out north of 100,000 pounds of thrust.
But it's the second stage that makes engineers from other companies shake their heads or lean in with interest, depending on their disposition. Stoke's design places a ring of thrust chambers around the perimeter, integrated directly with an actively cooled metallic heat shield. Instead of a traditional engine bell pointing down, the whole stage becomes its own heat shield on the way back—a configuration the company has dubbed, with characteristic understatement, "unconventional."
In September 2023, Stoke flew a 30-foot prototype of this upper stage—nicknamed "Hopper2"—in a short vertical hop at its Moses Lake, Washington test site. The vehicle took off, hovered, and set back down. Not orbital, but proof the basic concept could fly. Last June, the company test-fired its full-flow staged-combustion booster engine for the first time, a milestone that suggested the first-stage development was tracking alongside the more exotic upper-stage work.
From Glenn to Stoke
Much of the fresh capital will finish outfitting LC-14, which has sat mostly dormant since the 1970s. Stoke has spent the past year installing propellant storage, water deluge systems for launch-day acoustics, and a horizontal integration facility where Nova will be assembled on its side before being raised vertical on the pad.
There's something almost cinematic about the choice of location. The same concrete and steel that supported Glenn's Mercury-Atlas 6 mission will, if Stoke's timeline holds, support a vehicle built on principles Glenn couldn't have imagined: full reuse, rapid turnaround, economics that treat rockets more like airplanes than artillery shells. The company had targeted early 2026 for pad activation, which means the clock is ticking. Initial test flights are expected to follow soon after, though "soon" in the launch business tends to be a sliding scale.
Stoke has already lined up customers willing to bet on the rocket before it flies. The manifest includes a late-2026 mission for Celestis, the memorial spaceflight company, which will send cremated remains on a deep-space trajectory beyond the Earth-Moon system—an unusual debut flight, perhaps, but one that doesn't require the precision of a satellite deployment. More significantly, the U.S. Space Force added Stoke to its National Security Space Launch Phase 3 Lane 1 program in March 2025. That on-ramp makes the startup eligible to compete for up to $5.6 billion in defense contracts through June 2029, assuming it can notch a successful first flight.
The Climate Angle and the Economics
Breakthrough Energy Ventures, the climate-tech fund backed by Bill Gates, led Stoke's $65 million Series A back in December 2021. The fund's thesis wasn't just about launch costs—it was about what affordable, frequent access to orbit might enable. Think constellations of methane-leak-detection satellites or wildfire-monitoring systems that could be refreshed and expanded without prohibitive price tags.
A 2025 preprint analyzing lifecycle emissions suggested reusable rockets could slash production-phase carbon output by up to 95% compared to expendable vehicles, since you're not building a new upper stage for every mission. Whether those gains survive scrutiny as more reusable vehicles actually fly remains an open question. But for a fund focused on climate applications, the pitch was evidently compelling enough to keep doubling down: Breakthrough participated in the Series C ($260 million, January 2025), the Series B ($100 million, October 2023), and now the Series D.
The funding cadence tells its own story about capital intensity in the launch business. Stoke has raised more than $1.3 billion in roughly three years. SpaceX, for context, raised a small fraction of that in its first decade—but SpaceX also built Falcon 1 with duct tape and desperation, nearly went bankrupt, and operated in an era when venture capital hadn't yet decided space was investable. The market has changed. Investors now understand that building rockets costs serious money and that reusability might actually pencil out.
A Crowded Field, A Narrow Window
Stoke is hardly alone in chasing the medium-lift market. Rocket Lab's Neutron is progressing toward a debut flight, targeting partial reusability with first-stage recovery. Relativity Space's Terran R, powered by 3D-printed engines, is aiming for the same segment. Blue Origin's New Glenn—backed by Jeff Bezos and years in development—expects to fly imminently with a reusable first stage and expendable upper stage, the current industry standard.
Nova's spec sheet slots it between small-lift and heavy-lift categories: 3,000 kilograms to low Earth orbit when operating fully reusable, stretching to 7,000 kilograms if the company opts to fly expendable for maximum performance. That's smaller than Falcon 9 but bigger than Rocket Lab's existing Electron vehicle. Whether the market can support four or five new entrants in that weight class is one of those questions that tends to get answered the hard way.
Stoke's advantage, if it works, would be operational. Recovering both stages should—in theory—enable faster turnaround and lower costs than competitors who still throw away their upper stages. But theory and practice have a complicated relationship in aerospace. The company employs somewhere between 200 and 500 people, according to LinkedIn data, spread across its Kent headquarters and Moses Lake test site. That's lean for a launch startup, which could be a strength (efficiency) or a vulnerability (stretched resources) depending on how development proceeds.
Proving It
With LC-14 construction nearing completion and $1.34 billion in the bank, Stoke has bought itself runway. What it hasn't bought is certainty. The next major milestone is straightforward to describe and fiendishly difficult to execute: launch the upper stage to orbit, bring it back through reentry, and land it in one piece.
Every launch vehicle before Nova has either discarded the upper stage or never tried to recover it in the first place. Maybe there's a reason for that. Or maybe—and this is what Stoke is betting $1.34 billion on—everyone else just stopped trying too soon.
The pad where John Glenn sat atop an Atlas rocket 64 years ago will have a chance to weigh in on the question soon enough.
