Inside The Startup Building Reusable Rockets

Stoke Space co-founders Andy Lapsa and Tom Feldman explain how they are building the first fully reusable upper-stage rocket capsule, which no one has achieved before.

• Stoke’s Andromeda upper stage survives reentry at 17,000 mph and 2,700°F using liquid hydrogen flowing through a heat exchanger as a coolant.
• The second stage is thrown away on every rocket mission industry-wide; solving this is the core problem Stoke is attacking.
• Only ~150 commercial space launches happen per year globally; most capacity is consumed by Starlink, leaving little availability for other customers.
• Stoke has raised ~$990M to date and operates out of a 168,000 sq ft factory in Kent, WA designed to build ~7 vehicles per year.
• Lapsa and Feldman left Blue Origin in 2019 and built their first prototype engine in a shipping container in Tom’s backyard within 2 months.
• Iteration speed is a core strategy: vertical integration compresses a 1-month supplier cycle down to 1-2 days.
• Stoke built its own internal manufacturing and operations software called Bolt Line to bridge garage-scale to FAA-overseen flight operations.
• First orbital launch is planned for later in 2026, using historic Cape Canaveral Launch Complex 14, where John Glenn first orbited Earth.

2026-01-08 · Watch on YouTube