It’s a critical time for companies competing to develop a commercial successor to the International Space Station. NASA is working with several companies, including Axiom Space, Voyager Technologies, Blue Origin, and Vast, to develop concepts for private stations where it can lease time for its astronauts.

The space agency awarded Phase One contracts several years ago and is now in the final stages of writing requirements for Phase Two after asking for feedback from industry partners in September. This program is known as Commercial LEO Destinations, or CLDs in industry parlance.

Time is running out for NASA if it wants to establish continuity from the International Space Station, which will reach its end of life in 2030, with a follow-on station ready to go before then.

One of the more intriguing companies in the competition is Voyager Technologies, which recently announced a strategic investment from Janus Henderson, a global investment firm. In another sign that the competition is heating up, Voyager also just hired John Baum away from Vast, where he was the company’s business development leader.

To get a sense of this competition and how Voyager is coming along with its Starlab space station project, Ars spoke with the firm’s chairman, Dylan Taylor. This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.

Ars: I know a lot of the companies working on CLDs are actively fundraising right now. How is this coming along for Voyager and Starlab?

Dylan Taylor: Fundraising is going quite well. You saw the Janus announcement. That’s significant for a few reasons. One is, it’s a significant investment. Of course, we’re not disclosing exactly how much. (Editor’s note: It likely is on the order of $100 million.) But the more positive development on the Janus investment is that they are such a well-known, well-respected financial investor.

If you look at the kind of bellwether investors, Janus would be up there with a Blackstone or Blackrock or Fidelity. So it’s significant not only in terms of capital contribution, but in… showing that commercial space stations are investable. This isn’t money coming from the Gulf States. It’s not a syndication of a bunch of $1,000 checks from retail investors. This is a very significant institutional investor coming in, and it’s a signal to the market. They did significant diligence on all our competitors, and they went out of the way saying that we’re far and away the best business plan, best design, and everything else, so that’s why it’s so meaningful.

Ars: How much funding do you need to raise to complete Starlab?

Dylan Taylor: We currently estimate the cost to design, manufacture, and launch Starlab to be approximately $2.8 to $3.3 billion. And then if you look at what’s anticipated in Phase Two in the NASA services contracts, it’s about a $700 million capital plug that we need to raise in the market, and we’re well on our way on that. We’re not going to raise all of that now because obviously, after we win Phase Two, there will be a significant markup in valuation, and we’ll have the ability to raise additional capital at that time. So we’re only raising what we need at this stage of the project.

Ars: How are you coming as far as progress on your initial contract with NASA?

Dylan Taylor: We have our CDR (critical design review) coming up. It’s December 15 to 18. We have achieved 27 milestones. We have four milestones left on our CLD Phase One contract.

Ars: You’ve changed your partners on the project a little bit. Where are you now on that?

Dylan Taylor: We moved the structure construction from Bremen, Germany, to Louisiana. That will be constructed by Vivace. So the structure will be made in the US. We have a significant presence, as you know, in Houston. We’ll have it in Louisiana. And we just added Leidos to the team, so there’ll be a big Huntsville component to our test and integration as well. So the key partners right now in terms of equity ownership and the joint venture are ourselves, Airbus, Mitsubishi, Palantir, Space Applications Services, and MDA. And then additional partners who are on the team that aren’t equity holders include Northrup, Leidos, and Hilton Hotels.

A rendering of the Starlab space station in orbit. Credit: Voyager Technologies

Ars: What is your current timeline for development?

Dylan Taylor: We’re still on 2029. I don’t anticipate that pushing out for any reason in the near term. Obviously, if we had a significant delay on Phase Two selection, that could impact things. You know, some people think that we have Starship risk. In my view, I’m highly confident Starship will be ready to go when we’re ready to launch. If it’s not, based on the New Glenn upgrades that were recently announced, if they’re successful in implementing those, then theoretically New Glenn could also launch us. As you know, we’ve got a launch agreement with SpaceX on Starship, so that’s still the plan.

Ars: I would not consider a 2029 Starship launch date a major risk.

Dylan Taylor: Yeah, exactly. I’m not concerned about it. But there are people who are concerned. They bring it up a lot. Now, that being said, not to pick on the other players, but my understanding is Axiom has to launch on Falcon Heavy. I’m not sure SpaceX is that excited to do a Falcon Heavy launch, so in my mind, that could be a potential risk for them. Maybe, I don’t know.

Ars: What was your reaction to the directive that came out in August from NASA interim administrator Sean Duffy on commercial space stations?

Dylan Taylor: I was surprised at the fact that they appeared to be backing off the requirements a bit. You know, I don’t know where it (the Phase Two Request for Proposals from NASA) ends up. That’s anybody’s guess. But if I were to bet, I would think it would be more similar to the original procurement strategy than the memo. But we won’t know until it comes out.

Ars: Obviously, there is still an interim administrator at NASA. We had a government shutdown for a month. What’s your current understanding of the timeline for the Phase Two process?

Dylan Taylor: The last information we have is that they still expected to send the RFP out by the end of the year, and then have Phase Two selection sometime late Q1, early Q2 next year.  That information was mostly communicated prior to the government shutdown. So I think with the government shutdown—I’m guessing here because I don’t know—but I think you probably roll forward 45 days or so. If that’s the case, we’re probably looking at an RFP in January and a selection in probably in June or July. That’s our best estimate based upon what we have been told.

Ars: We’re now under five years from the International Space Station coming down. There’s still a lot of work to be done for replacement. I think it’s clear there are some challenges for this program, not speaking specifically about Starlab but just the general idea of commercial space stations. What advice would you have for Jared Isaacman to help make sure the CLD program is a success for NASA and the country?

Dylan Taylor: I know Jared, and I’m very optimistic. He’s very, very smart, a very capable person. He’s pro-commercial space.  Based on his testimony and just what I know about him, he believes that commercial solutions are often better than government solutions. So I’m very optimistic he’s going to be a transformational administrator. I think it’s very good for the industry. I think the advice I would have for him on this program would be the same advice I’d have for him on all programs. And it’s just simply clarity—clarity of mission, clarity of requirements, clarity of timeline, and the market will figure it out from there.

And specifically on CLDs, I think it’s important they make a selection sooner rather than later. In my view, that selection should not just be a Space Act Agreement. It should be tied to a services commitment on the backside as well. I think that’s important to signal who the chosen commercial space station successors are, whether there’s two or three. I don’t think there will be one. There shouldn’t be one.

Ars: Has the government committed enough funding to make the program a success?

Dylan Taylor: I think this is where I might deviate from our competitors a bit. I think the answer is yes. I mean, if we have a reasonable amount of capital allocated in Phase Two and service contract commitments, the rest of the capital markets will be there. We demonstrated this with Janus and our IPO, frankly. Separately, we raised $430 million on a convertible note for Voyager, in 48 hours, two weeks ago, at an interest rate of 0.75 percent. The capital is there for well-run companies that are able to communicate the future of these projects to investors.

So the short answer is, yes, I think there is enough funding. I think where sometimes NASA might get the story a bit wrong is that they think they need to provide all the capital for these programs. And that’s not really the case. They need to provide some of the capital. But most importantly, they need to provide the signal. We saw this on launch, right? I mean, NASA didn’t fund all of SpaceX’s development. They’re certainly not funding all of Starship’s development. But what they did do is they selected Commercial Cargo and Commercial Crew winners, and then SpaceX is probably the best example of being able to raise capital around that.

Ars: Do you think there are customers beyond NASA for these stations? I’m sure you must. But who are they?

Dylan Taylor: There’s huge demand, Eric. Honestly, this has been one of my surprises. Over the last 12 months, and I really want to credit Axiom on this, with the PAM (private astronaut) missions, they really pioneered this notion of sovereign astronauts outside of the ISS consortium. There’s huge demand from emerging countries with space agencies that want a sovereign astronaut, that want to send their astronauts to the ISS or to a safe and qualified and NASA-approved space station. So there is a lot of demand there.

We’re in active discussions—I would say advanced discussions—with a lot of sovereign astronauts, and I fully anticipate that we’re going to be oversubscribed when it comes to astronaut demand. And then on the commercial capacity, on the research side, we see huge demand for our commercial research capacity on Starlab. And just to remind you, we have 100 percent of the research capacity of the ISS, and we see demand in excess of our capacity. We’re striking deals as we speak.

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We all know streaming services’ usual tricks for making more money: get more subscribers, charge those subscribers more money, and sell ads. But science streaming service Curiosity Stream is taking a new route that could reshape how streaming companies, especially niche options, try to survive.

Discovery Channel founder John Hendricks launched Curiosity Stream in 2015. The streaming service costs $40 per year, and it doesn’t have commercials.

The streaming business has grown to also include the Curiosity Channel TV channel. CuriosityStream Inc. also makes money through original programming and its Curiosity University educational programming. The firm turned its first positive net income in its fiscal Q1 2025, after about a decade of business.

With its focus on science, history, research, and education, Curiosity Stream will always be a smaller player compared to other streaming services. As of March 2023, Curiosity Stream had 23 million subscribers, a paltry user base compared to Netflix’s 301.6 million (as of January 2025).

Still, in an extremely competitive market, Curiosity Stream’s revenue increased 41 percent year over year in its Q3 2025 earnings announced this month. This was largely due to the licensing of Curiosity Stream’s original programming to train large language models (LLMs).

“Looking at our year-to-date numbers, licensing generated $23.4 million through September, which … is already over half of what our subscription business generated for all of 2024,” Phillip Hayden, Curiosity Stream’s CFO, said during a call with investors this month.

Thus far, Curiosity Stream has completed 18 AI-related fulfillments “across video, audio, and code assets” with nine partners, an October announcement said.

The company expects to make more revenue from IP licensing deals with AI companies than it does from subscriptions by 2027, “possibly earlier,” CEO Clint Stinchcomb said during the earnings call.

Put another way, Curiosity Stream, previously considered a streaming firm, is also now squarely in the AI licensing business. This isn’t a side gig; it’s one of the streaming company’s key pillars (alongside streaming subscriptions and ads) that it hopes will fuel years of growth.

Speaking at Parks Associates’ “Future of Video” event this week, Needham Co. analyst Laura Martin noted that Curiosity Stream is licensing 300,000 hours’ worth of its own content, as well as 1.7 million hours’ worth of third-party content. Curiosity Stream splits the AI licensing revenue with those third parties, she said.

In fact, Curiosity Stream is peddling more content to hyperscalers and AI developers than it is to streaming viewers. The company’s library includes 2 million hours of content, but “the overwhelming majority of that is for AI licensing,” Stinchcomb said.

“We are increasing our volume of rights in our traditional platforms, but the overwhelming majority is for AI licensing,” he added.

A new way forward

Curiosity Stream’s success with licensing content to AI companies could interest other streaming companies that are contemplating additional sources of revenue to fund new content, as well as technology, marketing, talent, and other initiatives, and to please investors. At this week’s event, Martin warned that other content-centric companies will need to find new revenue streams, as Curiosity Stream has, or else be “put out of business by their competitors.”

Further tempting streaming companies with original programming and connections to IP holders, Stinchcomb believes that the opportunity is growing.

“In 2027, possibly earlier, as more open source models become accessible, there will potentially be hundreds and even thousands of companies who will need video to fine-tune specific models for consumer and enterprise purposes,” he said.

Still, it’s risky to assume that licensing content to AI companies is a long-term business. In this nascent stage of generative AI, it’s unclear how much and for how long hyperscalers will be willing to pay content companies. Ongoing litigation may also impact how companies treat IP leveraged by LLMs. Like other organizations that have recently turned to licensing content to AI companies, including Ars Technica owner Conde Nast, IP licensing can be a lifeline that simultaneously feeds what may soon become rivals.

But as it stands, not every streaming service is likely to survive the next few years. Streaming customers are increasingly complaining about how hard it is to find stuff to watch. People are getting annoyed with having multiple streaming subscriptions, and there’s strong demand for less content fragmentation.

As such, more mergers and acquisitions are expected among streaming companies. And so, in many ways, it seems a critical time for streaming services to build value quickly. Licensing IP to data-hungry, capital-happy AI companies could immediately help. But the long-term consequences remain difficult to pinpoint.

For its part, Curiosity Stream is still looking to grow its subscription and ads business. And executives would have you believe they are thinking long-term about AI deals. Per Stinchcomb:

We also see real opportunity for licensing beyond simply a training right. Additional grants of rights, like display rights, or transformative rights, or adaptation rights, or even certain derivative rights, or possibly even some that are as of yet unnamed. I mean, we’re building long-term relationships, and we’re committed to making sure that as we enter into all of these agreements, it’s not one and done.

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A man in Ireland earned the unpleasant distinction of developing an exceedingly rare infection on his penis—one that has a puzzling origin, but may be connected to his work with dead animals.

According to an article published in ASM Case Reports on Thursday, the 57-year-old man went to a hospital in Dublin after his penis became red, swollen, and painful over the course of a week. He also had a fever. Doctors promptly admitted him to the hospital and noted that he had received a kidney transplant 15 years prior. As such, he was on immunosuppressive drugs, which keep his body from rejecting the organ, but could also allow infections to run amok.

Initial blood work found hints of an infection, and the doctors initially suspected a bacterial skin infection (cellulitis) had taken hold in his nether region. So, they put him on some standard antibiotics for that. But his penis only got worse, redder, and more swollen. This prompted consultation with infectious disease doctors.

A more thorough review of the man’s case revealed that in the three months before his hospital visit, he had experienced fever, drenching night sweats, chills, loss of appetite, and weight loss. They also noted that he had a lot of dead animal exposure. He was born and raised on a farm in rural Ireland, worked as a butcher handling deer and occasionally cattle, and was an avid hunter who field­-dressed game.

Dangerous disease

Given the systemic symptoms he mentioned in previous months, the doctors took computed tomography (CT) scans of his chest, abdomen, and pelvic region to investigate the cause. The images quickly revealed the answer; his lungs were speckled with seed-like nodules, characteristic of miliary tuberculosis.

Miliary tuberculosis (MTB) is a severe form of tuberculosis in which the instigating bacteria— Mycobacterium tuberculosis or potentially a relative that infects cows and deer, Mycobacterium bovis—spread widely through the body and create small lesions. The name “miliary” dates back to 1700, when a physician noted that the specks resembled millet seeds.

While Mycobacterium can spread through the air and are often found in the lungs, the bacteria can strike anywhere in the body. Still, penile tuberculosis is exceedingly rare. In fact, it’s uncommon to have tuberculosis erupt anywhere in the urinary and genital tracts. Among the infections that spring up in the region, penile infections account for less than 1 percent.

But, given the man’s lungs and his immunosuppressed status, the unusual presentation became their leading guess—and tests soon confirmed it. Mycobacterium were identified in the man’s respiratory tract, and penile tissue tested also showed the bacteria, though the testing couldn’t identify what species of Mycobacterium.

Treatment for tuberculosis requires a regimen of several antibiotics and takes months. In the man’s case, they customized his treatment with a 12-month, four-drug regimen that wouldn’t interfere with his transplant.

Still, the penile lesion got worse before it got better. He developed a large necrotic ulceration on the side of his penis, and his foreskin began to “break down.” Surgeons had to mechanically cut out the dead tissue. After 10 months, his infection appeared to have cleared, and his penile lesion had improved.

Unexplained exposure

It remains unclear how the man got the infection. He told doctors he wasn’t aware of coming in contact with any tuberculosis patients and wasn’t in settings where the bacteria normally spread, such as prisons. It’s possible that the bacteria had been lurking in his transplanted kidney.

However, doctors speculated that it could also have been due to his animal exposure. Deer and cows are known to spread M. bovis, and people who hunt and butcher animals are known to be at risk. These workers can become infected from inhaling it from the exhaled breath of an infected animal or from direct contact with an infected animal’s wounded tissue or body fluids, such as what happens during slaughtering.

It’s unclear if the man’s infection started in his lungs or on his penis. It’s possible he could have inhaled it first; the bacteria were clearly in his lungs. But he could have also picked up the bacteria on his hands while working and then spread it further while, for example, using the bathroom. The doctors note a similar situation called “Prosector’s wart,” when doctors or scientists conduct dissections or autopsies on tuberculosis-infected specimens, they can develop wart-like tuberculosis skin infections. The infections are often on the hands, but can occur anywhere on the body.

Tuberculosis has been found to spread in some surprising ways. The doctors noted a case report from the UK in 2001 in which a man developed penile tuberculosis and his partner developed uterine tuberculosis a year later, suggesting sexual transmission.

While it will remain a mystery how the man developed such a rare infection, there’s a happy ending for this case and others: “Encouragingly, all published cases of penile TB responded well to anti-TB therapy with full recovery,” the doctors conclude.

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One of the world’s premier security organizations has canceled the results of its annual leadership election after an official lost an encryption key needed to unlock results stored in a verifiable and privacy-preserving voting system.

The International Association of Cryptologic Research (IACR) said Friday that the votes were submitted and tallied using Helios, an open source voting system that uses peer-reviewed cryptography to cast and count votes in a verifiable, confidential, and privacy-preserving way. Helios encrypts each vote in a way that assures each ballot is secret. Other cryptography used by Helios allows each voter to confirm their ballot was counted fairly.

An “honest but unfortunate human mistake”

Per the association’s bylaws, three members of the election committee act as independent trustees. To prevent two of them from colluding to cook the results, each trustee holds a third of the cryptographic key material needed to decrypt results.

“Unfortunately, one of the three trustees has irretrievably lost their private key, an honest but unfortunate human mistake, and therefore cannot compute their decryption share,” the IACR said. “As a result, Helios is unable to complete the decryption process, and it is technically impossible for us to obtain or verify the final outcome of this election.”

To prevent a similar incident, the IACR will adopt a new mechanism for managing private keys. Instead of requiring all three chunks of private key material, elections will now require only two. Moti Yung, the trustee who was unable to provide his third of the key material, has resigned. He’s being replaced by Michel Abdalla.

The IACR is a nonprofit scientific organization providing research in cryptology and related fields. Cryptology is the science and practice of designing computation and communication systems that remain secure in the presence of adversaries. The associate is holding a new election that started Friday and runs through December 20.

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This week the company announced that it would require users to undergo an A.I.-powered age estimation process in order to chat with others on the platform. Will this change reassure parents?

LAUNCH COMPLEX 14, Cape Canaveral, Fla.—The platform atop the hulking steel tower offered a sweeping view of Florida’s rich, sandy coastline and brilliant blue waves beyond. Yet as captivating as the vista might be for an aspiring rocket magnate like Andy Lapsa, it also had to be a little intimidating.

To his right, at Launch Complex 13 next door, a recently returned Falcon 9 booster stood on a landing pad. SpaceX has landed more than 500 large orbital rockets. And next to SpaceX sprawled the launch site operated by Blue Origin. Its massive New Glenn rocket is also reusable, and founder Jeff Bezos has invested tens of billions of dollars into the venture.

Looking to the left, Lapsa saw a graveyard of sorts for commercial startups. Launch Complex 15 was leased to a promising startup, ABL Space, two years ago. After two failed launches, ABL Space pivoted away from commercial launch. Just beyond lies Launch Complex 16, where Relativity Space aims to launch from. The company has already burned through $4 billion in its efforts to reach orbit. Had billionaire Eric Schmidt not stepped in earlier this year, Relativity would have gone bankrupt.

Andy Lapsa may be a brainy rocket scientist, but he is not a billionaire. Far from it.

“When you start a company like this, you have no idea how far you’re going to be able to make it, you know?” he admitted.

Lapsa and another aerospace engineer, Tom Feldman, founded Stoke Space a little more than five years ago. Both had worked the better part of a decade at Blue Origin and decided they wanted to make their mark on the industry. It was not an easy choice to start a rocket company at a time when there were dozens of other entrants in the field.

Andy Lapsa speaks at the Space Economy Summit in November 2025. Credit: The Economist Group

“It was a huge question in my head: Does the world really need a 151st rocket company?” he said. “And in order for me to say yes to that question, I had to very systematically go through all the other players, thinking about the economics of launch, about the business plan, about the evolution of these companies over time. It was very non-intuitive to me to start another launch company.”

So why did he do it?

I traveled to Florida in November to answer this question and to see if the world’s 151st rocket company had any chance of success.

Launch Complex 14

It takes a long time to build a launch site. Probably longer than you might think.

Lapsa and Feldman spent much of 2020 working on the basic design of a rocket that would eventually be named Nova and deciding whether they could build a business around it. In December of that year, they closed their seed round of funding, raising $9.1 million. After this, finding somewhere to launch from became a priority.

They zeroed in on Cape Canaveral because it’s where the majority of US launch companies and customers are, as well as the talent to assemble and launch rockets. They learned in 2021 that the US Space Force was planning to lease an old pad, Space Launch Complex 14, to a commercial company. This was not just a good location to launch from; it was truly a historic location—John Glenn launched into orbit from here in 1962 aboard the Friendship 7 spacecraft. It was retired in 1967 and designated a National Historic Landmark.

But in recent years, the Space Force has sought to support the flourishing US commercial space industry, and it has offered Launch Complex 14. After the competition opened in 2021, Stoke Space won the lease a year later. Then began the long and arduous process of conducting an Environmental Assessment. It took nearly two years, and it was not until October 20, 2024, that Stoke was allowed to break ground.

None of the structures on the site were usable, and aside from the historic blockhouse dating to the Mercury program, everything else had to be demolished and cleared before work could begin.

As we walked the large ring encompassing the site, Lapsa explained that all of the tanks and major hardware needed to support a Nova launch were now on site. There is a large launch tower, as well as a launch mount upon which the rocket will be stood up. The company has mostly turned toward integrating all of the ground infrastructure and wiring up the site. A nearby building to assemble rockets and process payloads is well underway.

Lapsa seemed mostly relieved. “A year ago, this was my biggest concern,” he said.

He need not have worried. A few months before the company completed its environmental permitting, a tall, lanky, thickly bearded engineer named Jonathan Lund hired on. A Stanford graduate who got his start with the US Army Corps of Engineers, Lund worked at SpaceX during the second half of the 2010s, helping to lead the reconstruction of one launch pad, the crew tower project at Launch Complex 39A, and a pad at Vandenberg Space Force Base. He also worked on multiple landing sites for the Falcon 9 rocket. Lund arrived to lead the development of Stoke’s site.

This is Lund’s fifth launch pad. Each one presents different challenges. In Florida, for example, the water table lies only a few feet below the ground. But for most rockets, including Nova, a large trench must be dug to allow flames from the rocket engines to be carried away from the vehicle at ignition and liftoff. As we stood in this massive flame diverter, there were a few indications of water seeping in.

Still, the company recently completed a major milestone by testing the water suppression system, which dampens the energy of a rocket at liftoff to protect the launch pad. Essentially, the plume from the rocket’s engines flows downward where it meets a sheet of water, turning it into steam. This creates an insulating barrier of sorts.

Water suppression test at LC-14 complete. Flowed the diverter and rain birds in a “launch like” scenario. pic.twitter.com/rs1lEloPul

— Stoke Space (@stoke_space) October 21, 2025

The water comes from large pipes running down the flame diverter, each of which has hundreds of holes not unlike a garden sprinkler hose. Lund said the pipes and the frame they rest on were built near where we stood.

“We fabricated these pieces on site, at the north end of the flame trench,” Lund explained. “Then we built this frame in Cocoa Beach and shipped it in four different sections and assembled it on site. Then we set the frame on the ramp, put together this surface (with the pipes), and then Egyptian-style we slide it down the ramp right into position. We used some old-school methods, but simple sometimes works best. Nothing fancy.”

At this point, Lapsa interrupted. “I was pretty nervous,” he said. “The way you’re describing this sounded good on a PowerPoint. But I wasn’t sure it actually would work.”

But it did.

Waiting on Nova

So if the pad is rounding into shape, how’s that rocket coming?

It sounds like Stoke Space is doing the right things. Earlier this year, the company shipped a full-scale version of its second stage to its test site at Moses Lake in central Washington. There, it underwent qualification testing, during which the vehicle is loaded with cryogenic fuels on multiple occasions, pressurized, and put through other exercises. Lapsa said that testing went well.

The company also built a stubby version of its first stage. The tanks and domes had full-size diameters, but the stage was not its full height. That vehicle also underwent qualification testing and passed.

The company has begun building flight hardware for the first Nova rocket. The vehicle’s software is maturing. Work is well underway on the development of an automated flight termination system. “Having a team that’s been through this cycle many times, it’s something we started putting attention on very early,” Lapsa said. “It’s on a good path as well.”

And yet the final, frenetic months leading to a debut launch are crunch time for any rocket company: first assembly of the full vehicle, first time test-firing it all. Things will inevitably go wrong. The question is how bad will the problems be?

For as long as I’ve known Lapsa, he has been cagey about launch dates for Stoke. This is smart because in reality, no one knows. And seasoned industry people (and journalists) know that projected launch dates for new rockets are squishy. The most precise thing Lapsa will say is that Stoke is targeting “next year” for Nova’s debut.

The company has a customer for the first flight. If all goes well, its first mission will sail to the asteroid belt. Asteroid mining startup AstroForge has signed on for Nova 1.

Stoke Space isn’t shooting for the Moon. It’s shooting for something 1 million times further.

Too good to believe it’s true?

Stoke Space is far from the first company to start with grand ambitions. And when rocket startups think too big, it can be their undoing.

A little more than a decade ago, Firefly Space Systems in Texas based the design of its Alpha rocket on an aerospike engine, a technology that had never been flown to space before. Although this was theoretically a more efficient engine design, it also brought more technical risk and proved a bridge too far. By 2017, the company was bankrupt. When Ukrainian investor Max Polyakov rescued Firefly later that year, he demanded that Alpha have a more conventional rocket engine design.

Around the same time that Firefly struggled with its aerospike engine, another launch company, Relativity Space, announced its intent to 3D-print the entirety of its rockets. The company finally launched its Terran 1 rocket after eight years. But it struggled with additively manufacturing rockets. Relativity was on the brink of bankruptcy before a former Google executive, Eric Schmidt, stepped in to rescue the company financially. Relativity is now focused on a traditionally manufactured rocket, the Terran R.

Stoke Space’s Hopper 2 takes to the skies in September 2003 in Moses Lake, Washington. Credit: Stoke Space

So what to make of Stoke Space, which has an utterly novel design for its second stage? The stage is powered by a ring of 24 thrusters, an engine collectively named Andromeda. Stoke has also eschewed a tile-based heat shield to protect the vehicle during atmospheric reentry in favor of a regeneratively cooled design.

In this, there are echoes of Firefly, Relativity, and other companies with grand plans that had to be abandoned in favor of simpler designs to avoid financial ruin. After all, it’s hard enough to reach orbit with a conventional rocket.

But the company has already done a lot of testing of this design. Its first iteration of Andromeda even completed a hop test back in 2023.

“Andromeda is wildly new,” Lapsa said. “But the question of can it work, in my opinion, is a resounding yes.”

The engineering team had all manner of questions when designing Andromeda several years ago. How will all of those thrusters and their plumbing interact with one another? Will there be feedback? Is the heat shield idea practical?

“Those are the kind of unknowns that we knew we were walking into from an engineering perspective,” Lapsa said. “We knew there should be an answer in there, but we didn’t know exactly what it would be. It’s very hard to model all that stuff in the transient. So you just had to get after it, and do it, and we were able to do that. So can it work? Absolutely yes. Will it work out of the box? That’s a different question.”

First stage, too

Stoke’s ambitions did not stop with the upper stage. Early on, Lapsa, Feldman, and the small engineering team also decided to develop a full-flow staged combustion engine. This, Lapsa acknowledges, was a “risky” decision for the company. But it was a necessary one, he believes.

Full-flow staged combustion engines had been tested before this decade but were never flown. From an engineering standpoint, they are significantly more complex than a traditional staged combustion engine in that the oxidizer and propellant—which began as cryogenic liquids—arrive in the combustion chamber in a fully gaseous state. This interaction between two gases is more efficient and produces less wear and tear on turbines within the engine.

“You want to get the highest efficiency you can without driving the turbine temperature to a place where you have a short lifetime,” Lapsa said. “Full-flow is the right answer for that. If you do anything else, it’s a distraction.”

Stoke Space successfully tests its advanced full-flow staged combustion rocket engine, designed to power the Nova launch vehicle’s first stage. Credit: Stoke Space

It was also massively unproven. When Stoke Space was founded in 2020, no full-flow staged combustion engine had ever gotten close to space. SpaceX was developing the Raptor engine using the technology, but it would not make its first “spaceflight” until the spring of 2023 on the Super Heavy rocket that powers Starship. Multiple Raptors failed shortly after ignition.

But for a company choosing full reusability of its rocket, as SpaceX sought to do with Starship, there ultimately is no choice.

“Anything you build for full and rapid reuse needs to find margin somewhere in the system,” Lapsa said. “And really that’s fuel efficiency. It makes fuel efficiency a very strong, very important driver.”

In June 2024, Stoke Space announced it had just completed a successful hot fire test of its full-flow, staged combustion engine for Nova’s first stage. The propulsion team had, Lapsa said at the time, “worked tirelessly” to reach that point.

Not just another launch company?

Stoke Space got to the party late. After SpaceX’s success with the first Falcon 9 in 2010, a wave of new entrants entered the field over the next decade. They were drawing down billions in venture capital funding, and some were starting to go public at huge valuations as special purpose acquisition companies. But by 2020, the market seemed saturated. The gold rush for new launch companies was nearing the cops-arrive-to-bust-up-the-festivities stage.

Every new company seemed to have its own spin on how to conquer low-Earth orbit.

“There were a lot of other business plans being proposed and tried,” Lapsa said. “There were low-cost, mass-produced disposable rockets. There were rockets under the wings of aircraft. There were rocket engine companies that were going to sell to 150 launch companies. All of those ideas raised big money and deserve to be considered. The question is, which one is the winner in the end?”

And that’s the question he was trying to answer in his own mind. He was in his 30s. He had a family. And he was looking to commit his best years, professionally, to solving a major launch problem.

“What’s the thing that fundamentally moves the needle on what’s out there already today?” he said. “The only thing, in my opinion, is rapid reuse. And once you get it, the economics are so powerful that nothing else matters. That’s the thing I couldn’t get out of my head. That’s the only problem I wanted to work on, and so we started a company in order to work on it.”

Stoke was one of many launch companies five years ago. But in the years since, the field has narrowed considerably. Some promising companies, such as Virgin Orbit and ABL Space, launched a few times and folded. Others never made it to the launch pad. Today, by my count, there are fewer than 10 serious commercial launch companies in the United States, Stoke among them. The capital markets seem convinced. In October, Stoke announced a massive $510 million Series D funding round. That was a lot of money in a challenging time to raise launch firm funding.

So Stoke has the money it needs. It has a team of sharp engineers and capable technicians. It has a launch pad and qualified hardware. That’s all good because this is the point in the journey for a launch startup where things start to get very, very difficult.

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