Launch is Not Solved Yet, with Andy Lapsa (CEO, Stoke Space)

Andy Lapsa (0:00)

The biggest value thing that we can do, not only for the near-term market, but for our long-term prospect as a company, is unstick this bottleneck of launch. Do it in a way that's fundamentally changed the economics of space. Eventually, it's gonna overtake the global economy, which is real exciting.

Mo Islam (0:17)

That's a statement.

Andy Lapsa (0:19)

It will. I think it's an incredibly important moment for us as a civilization to not screw up the big glaring shortcoming that the industry has not figured out yet, is bringing a vehicle back from space, and turning it around, and flying again, without having to inspect it, without having to refurbish it. You just know that it's good, and you turn around and fly again. The way you scale this thing from 100 times a year to thousands of times a year, is by making those vehicles reusable.

Mo Islam (0:47)

We went from an industry where launch was so accessible, well, everyone thought, we thought costs were going to come down substantially, to now everyone's panicked about launch. How did that happen?

So, Andy, there are two pretty enormous things happening at Stoke right now. Well, one that's already happened, you just raised a billion dollars of capital, so congratulations on that. And you're also announcing a new variant of your Nova rocket.

And I think historically everyone's known the Nova rocket to be a three-ton to orbit, fully reusable launch vehicle. But now that's changing a bit. Maybe tell us a little bit about what you're building.

Andy Lapsa (1:34)

Well, we have what we call the Nova Pathfinder, which is the vehicle we have behind us, like you said, is three tons to orbit. We've been working behind the scenes on upgrading that. We're going to build Block 2 of the vehicle as 15 ton fully rapidly reusable rocket to low earth orbit. We can do in excess of that. And then what we're really excited about as well is because of our really high performing engines on both stages, its capacity to higher energy orbits is really pretty meaningful in the market.

And so we're going to have one more step on our path to delivering any orbit anytime. That's the goal.

Mo Islam (2:17)

So is it fair to say that this is not necessarily a new version of Nova, but it's almost like Nova is turning into a product family?

Andy Lapsa (2:27)

Nova is a product family. That's right. Exactly. And Pathfinder is going to address that three-ton to market. I think it is a very interesting and underserved market segment. What we've seen over the last few years, and especially in the last six to eight months, is the market has just exploded in the higher mass capacity segments, and we want to make sure that we're able to serve that in a really meaningful way as well.

Mo Islam (2:55)

So we have Nova here, and then we're also right in front of the first stage. So maybe feel free to use the model if you'd like, but what is Nova Block 2 going to look like versus this Block 1?

Andy Lapsa (3:12)

So first of all, both Novas are two-stage-to-orbit vehicles. The first stage is liquid oxygen, liquid methane. It's a stainless steel construction vehicle. First stage pops you up out of the atmosphere, second stage takes you all the way, the rest of the way to the orbit. One of the really unique things about our vehicle is that that second stage is fully reusable as well. So I'm sure we'll get into all of that. Your question is the difference between the Pathfinder and Block 2

And so what you'll see is the diameter will grow a little bit on the first stage and the height will increase a little bit, but it will leverage all of the same manufacturing methods and approaches that we use for Pathfinder. And we've developed for that in a really, really flexible way where we bring in raw material and rocket ships out the other end of the factory.

So all of that gets to be reused. We're using our first stage Zenith engine over again. We just use more of them. And probably the biggest visual difference is going to be on the second stage where we've worked really hard to, what we say internally, to delete the taper. And so you'll have a cylindrical second stage. We'll still have a base heat shield integrated into the rest of the liquid hydrogen, liquid oxygen engine. And it'll be cylindrical so that we can scale its size. And we'll be able to scale it without constraining the payload volume.

Mo Islam (4:38)

Right. Now, three tons fully reusable to 15 tons fully reusable.