The space race is in full gear. In 2022, the space sector accounted for 0.5% of the nation’s GDP, or $131.8 billion. According to the latest government data, the industry also experienced real GDP growth of 2.3%, higher than the overall U.S. growth rate of 1.9%. Additionally, the space economy has been a significant driver of job creation, adding 347,000 private-sector jobs in 2022. Amid this growth, innovative companies like Stoke Space are leading efforts to prioritize sustainability in space exploration.
Leveraging advanced technologies like reusable rockets, Stoke Space aims to reduce the environmental impact of space missions by 98% compared to its competitors. Its signature Nova rocket, which it announced last fall following an immensely successful Series B funding round, is 100% reusable and engineered for daily flights. The rocket’s unique design allows both the lower and upper stages (or parts of the rocket that can be separated during flight) to be reused immediately after launch, eliminating the need to rebuild the rocket for each mission.
Stoke Space founder and CEO Andy Lapsa says this reusability shifts the industry from a “production-limited” to an “operations-limited” model, significantly cutting costs and raising the potential frequency of launches. Lapsa, a former employee of Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos’s space company, left in 2019 after more than ten years to found the space startup.
Unlike industry heavyweights like SpaceX, Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic, and Blue Origin, Stoke Space is not concerned with commercial space travel. Instead, its focus is on using space technologies—specifically, satellites—to address climate-related issues on Earth.
“We’ve long thought that space technologies have a role to play in decarbonizing. We started thinking many years ago around how do we deploy more satellites focused on climate problems? How do we do things like detecting methane leaks, which have a huge warming potential? How do we detect wildfires in real time? How do we protect our natural resources, like our forests and our oceans, which have an important kind of carbon sink role in our ecosystem?” he said.
Stoke Space is still in its early testing phase, but it has already attracted an impressive $176.2 million in funding, with backing from prominent investors such as Bill Gates’ Breakthrough Energy Ventures. Other major supporters include NASA, the National Science Foundation, and the United States Space Force (on the public side), and private sector partners like Spark Capital, Toyota Ventures, Point72 Ventures, MaC Venture Capital, and NFX Ventures. This August, the Seattle-based startup was awarded a $4.5 million contract by the Defense Innovation Unit to develop a dual-use system capable of sending defense-related equipment from Earth into specialized orbits and back to the Earth’s surface.
The company is currently prototyping a two-stage launch vehicle design at its Moses Lake testing facility in Washington. “There is a lot of pent-up demand [for space-based solutions], especially as you project out into the middle and end of this decade that the launch industry is just not positioned to satisfy yet or to meet,” says Lapsa.
The space economy will be worth nearly $2 trillion by 2035, up from $630 billion in 2023, according to a report from McKinsey. As interest in space exploration soars, the industry’s impact will reverberate far beyond space itself. Not only will space-enabled technologies play a crucial role in helping solve some of the world’s most vital challenges, but the industry’s own pathway to decarbonization will further ensure it contributes to these solutions while minimizing environmental impact. Stoke Space’s journey into sustainable space exploration is a prime example of this.
The views and opinions expressed are those of the author’s and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of C3.
