Tag: Stoke Space

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Stoke Space puts its rocket through a short but sweet hop

Stoke Space's test vehicle fires engine during test "hop"
Stoke Space’s Hopper2 developmental rocket vehicle fires its engine during a test “hop.” (Stoke Space Photo)

A four-year-old Seattle-area startup called Stoke Space executed a successful up-and-down test of its “Hopper” developmental rocket vehicle today, marking a major milestone in its quest to create a fully reusable launch system.

Hopper2’s 15-second flight took place at Stoke’s test facility at Grant County International Airport in Moses Lake, Wash., at 11:24 a.m. PT. A hydrogen-fueled rocket engine sent the test vehicle to a height of 30 feet, with a landing 15 feet away from the launch pad, Stoke CEO Andy Lapsa told me.

“It’s the last test in our development program for Hopper, and by all accounts, it’s been very successful,” Lapsa said.

Today’s test follows up on work that was done this spring with an earlier prototype, Hopper1, and a static engine firing for Hopper2 that was conducted this month.

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Stoke Space gets to use John Glenn’s launch pad

Illustration: Stoke Space second stage in orbit
An artist’s conception shows Stoke Space’s reusable second stage in orbit. (Stoke Space Illustration)

Kent, Wash.-based Stoke Space says it’s won the go-ahead to take over the Florida launch complex where John Glenn began the trip that made him the first American in orbit in 1962.

That’s the upshot of the U.S. Space Force’s decision on Tuesday to allocate Space Launch Complex 14 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station to Stoke Space for use as a launch operations center.

“We are over the moon excited by this opportunity,” Julia Black, Stoke Space’s director of launch operations, said in a news release. “To be trusted with the reactivation of the historic Launch Complex 14 is an honor, and we look forward to adding to its well-distinguished accomplishments for America’s space program.”

Space Launch Delta 45, which manages Cape Canaveral’s launch facilities, said the allocation is part of a new Space Force strategy to maximize the use of excess launch property and the Eastern Range extending from the Florida coast.

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Breakthrough Energy makes a big bet on reusable rockets

Rocket thruster test
Stoke Space puts its “three-pack” of thrust chambers through a hot-fire test. (Stoke Space Photo)

Breakthrough Energy Ventures, the multibillion-dollar clean-tech initiative created by Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, is leading a $65 million funding round to back Kent, Wash.-based Stoke Space’s effort to create a new breed of fully reusable rockets — and believe it or not, there’s a climate change angle.

“There is no better way to see the Earth and the severity of its climate challenges than looking at the entire globe from space,” Carmichael Roberts, co-leader of Breakthrough Energy Ventures’ investment committee, said today in a news release.

“Imagine being able to detect wildfires in any country within minutes, identifying oil and gas methane emissions in real time for remediation, or verifying carbon stocks globally to enable large-scale carbon offset markets,” Roberts said. “These are just a few of the far-reaching opportunities that greater access to space can provide through advanced satellite technology.”

Roberts said rocket reusability could overcome two of the barriers to such applications. “Stoke’s unique vehicle design and operational capabilities provide a path to achieving ultra-low-cost, fast-turnaround launch for dedicated orbital delivery,” he said.

The rocket business isn’t known as an environmentally friendly industry — especially when toxic chemicals like hypergolics and perchlorates come into play, and when thousands of pieces of space junk litter the sky. But Stoke Space’s co-founder and CEO, Andy Lapsa, told me that his company wants to change all that.

“There are a lot of unsustainable rocket practices that have been done through history,” Lapsa said. “I think we’re in general getting smarter about that, and a reusable second stage is a big, important part of that. We can’t be dumping rockets in the ocean as we start flying hundreds or thousands of times per year.”

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Stoke Space stakes its claim for rocket reusability

Hotfire test
Stoke Space puts its “three-pack” of thrust chambers through a hot-fire test. (Stoke Space Photo)

In just six months, Kent, Wash.-based Stoke Space Technologies has turned a blank stretch of ground in Moses Lake, Wash., into a bridgehead for building a fully reusable rocket optimized for satellite launches.

“It was barren desert as recently as April,” co-founder and CEO Andy Lapsa told GeekWire, “and we were able to get all of the facilities up and running in order to run long-duration, liquid-hydrogen, liquid-oxygen rocket engine testing out there.”

The 2.3-acre test facility at Moses Lake’s airport already has seen action: Last month, Stoke Space completed a manufacturing demonstration of a full-scale second stage for its yet-to-be-named rocket. The two-year-old startup has also done full-power test firings of components for its second-stage rocket engine, a triplet of thrust chambers that Lapsa calls the “three-pack.”

“We did them on time and under budget actually, which I’m very proud of,” said Lapsa, a veteran of Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture. “You don’t hear that too much in our industry.”

Like Bezos and his billionaire rival at SpaceX, Elon Musk, Lapsa and his teammates at Stoke Space are chasing the dream of full rocket reusability. Their aim is to bring down the cost of access to orbit and open up a new wave of space applications.

SpaceX’s Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets have shown the way with first-stage reusability, but even those launch systems throw away the second stage after one use. Reducing that cost is what SpaceX’s Starship development program is all about. Blue Origin is also pursuing second-stage reusability as it works on its orbital-class New Glenn rocket, with a program code-named Project Jarvis.

Lapsa lauds the commitment that those bigger launch companies have made to full reusability, but says his venture is taking a different approach. “The first place to start is with the second stage,” he said. “The full system is designed to be 100% reusable at a high cadence, and I think the industry is still searching for that solution.”

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NASA awards $105 million to boost space tech

Second-stage engine injector
A second-stage engine injector blazes at Stoke’s component test facility. (Stoke Space Technologies Photo)

Two Washington state companies have won grants of up to $750,000 each from NASA to take space-related technologies they’re already working on to the next stage of development.

The awards to Renton-based Stoke Space Technologies and Bellevue-based Sequoia Scientific are part of the latest batch of NASA Small Business Innovation Research Phase II grants. Nationwide, $105 million in awards were allocated to 140 projects proposed by 127 small businesses spread across 34 states and Washington, D.C.

The aim of the program is to encourage the development of innovations that could contribute to NASA’s efforts in human exploration, space technology, science and aeronautics — and could find commercial, non-NASA applications as well. All of the Phase II awardees previously received NASA SBIR Phase I awards that were worth up to $125,000 each.

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Stoke Space raises $9.1 million for rocket reusability

Second-stage engine injector
A second-stage engine injector blazes at Stoke’s component test facility. (Stoke Space Technologies Photo)

Stoke Space Technologies, the Renton, Wash.-based company founded by veterans of Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture, has attracted $9.1 million in seed investments for extending rocket reusability to new frontiers.

The first goal will be to develop a new kind of reusable upper stage, Stoke co-founder and CEO Andy Lapsa said. “That’s the last domino to fall in the industry before reusability is commonplace,” Lapsa told GeekWire. “Even right now, I think space launch is in a production-limited paradigm.”

Rocket reusability is the watchword, to be sure — not only at Blue Origin, where Lapsa was an award-winning rocket engineer, but also at SpaceX and other leading launch companies.

Both Bezos and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk have said total reusability is the key to driving down the cost of access to space, and opening up new frontiers including regular runs to Mars and back. Until recently, however, the focus has been on reusing a rocket’s first-stage booster. The upper stage — which kicks in after the first stage is exhausted to push payloads the rest of the way to orbit — typically burns up during atmospheric re-entry at the end of its flight.

SpaceX is aiming to change that paradigm with its Starship super-rocket. The massive prototypes that are currently being tested at that company’s South Texas launch facility are part of a development effort for reusable second stages that would sit on top of an even more massive Super Heavy booster — and fly themselves back to a landing pad after they’ve done their job.

Lapsa said what SpaceX is doing with Starship is “incredible.”

“But I think that same type of mentality needs to be applied to the commercial satellite market, in order to really provide them with what they’re looking for,” he added. “So that’s where we’re starting.”

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Cosmic Space

Blue Origin veterans spark space startups

Andrew Lapsa
While at Blue Origin, Andrew Lapsa won an AIAA award. Now he's the CEO of his own company. (Blue Origin via Twitter / 2017 Photo)

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture turned 20 years old this week — and although the privately held company hasn’t yet put people into space, or put a rocket into orbit, it has spawned a new generation of space startups.

One of those startups, Relativity Space, pulled up stakes in Seattle early on and moved to Southern California. Now it’s making a multimillion-dollar splash and putting the pieces in place for the first launch of its Terran rocket from Florida next year.

Relativity is also going through a leadership transition: Jordan Noone, the venture’s co-founder and chief technology officer, announced today on Twitter that he’ll step back and become an executive adviser “in preparation for starting my next venture.” Relativity’s other co-founder, Blue Origin veteran Tim Ellis, will stay on as CEO.

Other startups are in semi-stealth mode. Here are three notable Seattle-area ventures with Blue Origin connections:

Stoke Space Technologies: Incorporated last October in Renton. Co-founders are CEO Andrew Lapsa, who was responsible for all aspects of development and operation for Blue Origin’s hydrogen-fueled BE-3 and BE-3U engines; and Thomas Feldman, an engineer who played a key role in designing components for the more powerful BE-4 engine, fueled by liquefied natural gas.

Stoke’s website says the company is “building technology to seamlessly connect Earth and orbit.” In May, the company won a $225,000 SBIR Phase I grant from the National Science Foundation to work on an integrated propulsion solution for reusable rocket upper stages.

Stoke says it’ll use the NSF funding “to develop new technology enabling space launch vehicles to re-enter the atmosphere and land propulsively at a target destination for reuse.” SpaceX’s Falcon rockets and Blue Origin’s yet-to-be-built New Glenn rocket are designed with first-stage reusability in mind. Stoke is looking ahead to the next giant leap in reusable rockets.

In addition to Lapsa and Feldman, LinkedIn lists three other Stoke employees with Blue Origin experience. And they have  job openings for a lead system architect and a “Superhuman.”

Reach Space Technologies: Incorporated in February in Maple Valley. The company’s website is still password-protected, but LinkedIn lists Mike Krene, former senior propulsion engineer at Blue Origin, as founder and CEO. Krene spent a decade at Blue Origin, and before that, he dealt with propulsion systems at SpaceX and Pratt & Whitney.

The venture says it aims to “accelerate the time and reduce the cost for new launch startups to get to commercial viability, thereby growing the overall launch market.”

“Our engine systems also provide a high-value, commercially focused propulsion option for existing NewSpace and traditional launch providers,” Reach Space says on its LinkedIn page.

The company says it has between two and 10 employees, including “leading engineers with experience across many flight and development rocket engine systems.”

Starfish Space: Incorporated last November in Kent, where Blue Origin is headquartered. The co-founders are Trevor Bennett, a former flight sciences engineer at Blue Origin; and Austin Link, who spent three years at Blue Origin as a flight sciences simulation engineer. Ian Heidenberger, Starfish’s principal roboticist, was an autonomous-controls engineer at Blue Origin.

Starfish says it’s a venture-backed startup but has not yet revealed details about its investors or investments. It’s working on an “on-demand, in-space transportation service,” including a space tug that could be used to relocate, deorbit or extend the life of satellites. It’s also developing the software to support rendezvous and proximity operations — with an emphasis on electric propulsion.

Four years ago, Jeff Bezos told me his goal for Blue Origin was to build the “heavy-lifting infrastructure” for a wider space industry ecosystem, just as the U.S. Postal Service, UPS and the internet furnished the infrastructure that got Amazon off the ground. Now it looks as if Blue Origin is providing a seedbed for that ecosystem, even before the company has fully occupied its own niche in the marketplace.

Correction for 12:35 a.m. PT Sept. 10: We’ve fixed the spelling of Ian Heidenberger’s name. Hat tip to Isaac Alexander.