Stoke Space

Nova stands about forty metres tall and is designed so that both halves come home. The first stage carries seven Zenith engines burning methane and oxygen on the full-flow staged combustion cycle that SpaceX spent years maturing on Raptor. The second stage is the strange one. In place of a bell nozzle it carries a ring of twenty-four 3D-printed thrust chambers arranged around a metallic heat shield, and the liquid hydrogen already aboard to feed those chambers is routed through the shield to cool it during reentry. The heat shield is part of the engine.

Andy Lapsa ran the BE-3 and BE-3U programmes at Blue Origin and spent roughly six months working the numbers in his basement before starting the company with Tom Feldman. Their argument is that the industry fixated on the wrong half of the rocket. Landing boosters is solved and visible, while the upper stage is still thrown away on every flight, and an upper stage that has to survive orbital reentry is where the cost actually sits. Regenerative cooling is ordinary practice inside a combustion chamber, where the thermal load is about twenty times worse than reentry, and the wager is that it works on the outside too, returning a stage that can fly again without refurbishment.

None of that has been tested from orbit. The evidence so far is a fifteen-second hop to about thirty feet in 2023, a run of engine hotfires, and a structural campaign on the flight article in mid-2026. Nova's debut has moved from 2025 to early 2026 to the end of 2026, and the first flight will deliberately expend the vehicle with no landing attempt, so the idea the company was founded on will still be unproven once it is over. That is roughly $1.34 billion raised against a rocket that has not left the ground, on the harder propellant, with a first-stage engine cycle that took a far larger company years to tame.