KENT, Wash. — Like two of the world’s best-known billionaires, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, Stoke Space CEO Andy Lapsa is passionate about making spaceships as reusable as airplanes.
“Part of the big thesis of the company is, how do you build a fully, rapidly reusable space vehicle that goes to space, performs a function, comes back and turns around and flies again,” he says. “That’s not a new vision. We’ve been dreaming about fully reusable spacecraft since the ’50s and ’60s, and probably before that. So the big question is, how do you do it?”
Unlike Bezos or Musk, Lapsa isn’t a billionaire. Instead, he made his case to backers who have billions of dollars to invest. Those backers include Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, whose investments in Stoke have been made through Breakthrough Energy Ventures, a fund that focuses on clean-tech innovations for the climate challenge.
Rockets that fight climate change? That’s part of Lapsa’s uncommon perspective on the benefits of reusable rocket ships.