Stoke Awarded Contract to Develop Critical Space Mobility Capabilities
Kent, Washington, August 28, 2024. Today, Stoke announced it has been selected for a $4.5M award by the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) to prototype a solution that will enable responsive and precise point-to-point delivery of cargo to, through, and from space.
The award comes to Stoke via the DIU’s Novel Responsive Space Delivery (NRSD) project, which is designed to fund the advancement of commercial solutions for responsive and precise point-to-point delivery to orbit, between vehicles in orbit, and to precise locations on Earth. With this award, Stoke’s design and architecture can be readily tailored into a dual-use system that delivers Defense effects directly from Earth to unconventional orbits, as well as from orbit to the Earth’s surface.
“We are thrilled to win this investment from DIU,” said Andy Lapsa, Stoke co-founder and chief executive, “Our unique reusable upper stage technology represents a significant leap forward in improving launch costs and launch availability through a flexible and responsive platform. It also presents new capabilities altogether, such as the ability to move critical payloads through space or return them to Earth. We are excited to collaborate with the DIU to evolve our capabilities to meet defense and national security needs.”
Stoke is developing a fully and rapidly reusable two-stage launch vehicle designed to deliver payloads to low Earth orbit at substantially improved cost and cadence. Stoke’s novel reusable upper stage vehicle leverages an advanced internally developed liquid rocket engine with an integrated liquid-cooled metallic heat shield for robust and reusable reentry thermal protection. These and other features are designed for minimal refurbishment between flights, enabling an unprecedented, ultra-high flight cadence.
About Stoke Space
Stoke is scaling the space economy by providing low-cost, on-demand transport to, through, and from space. It’s developing fully and rapidly reusable rockets and space vehicles designed to operate with aircraft-like frequency. Stoke’s technology development has been funded by the U.S. Space Force, NASA, the National Science Foundation, and other government and private partners.
