Stoke Space gets a conditional $150 million loan from the Department of War for a second Florida launch pad

US launch company Stoke Space has secured a conditional commitment for a $150 million loan from the Department of War’s Office of Strategic Capital (OSC). The department announced the agreement on Monday, October 26. With the money the company, which is developing fully reusable rockets, will build a second launch pad at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida.

The aim of the funding is reliable, high-cadence access to space. The loan will be combined with private capital to build the pad. Because it is a conditional commitment, the loan is finalised only once Stoke meets a set of financial, legal and technical conditions and due diligence is completed.

“By expanding domestic launch facility capacity, this investment enables launch service providers to give our commercial and defense partners reliable, high-cadence access to space,” said OSC director David Lorch. The office’s senior managing director of investments, Jordan Sibold, added that new launch infrastructure will “strengthen the overall capacity and resilience of the commercial space industrial base”.

A pad for Nova Block 2

The new pad is intended for Nova Block 2, the largest version of the company’s rocket. Block 2 will carry 15 metric tons to low Earth orbit, with a 5-metre-diameter payload fairing, and its first launch is placed in 2029. Before it will fly the smaller Nova Pathfinder, with its first orbital mission in early 2027 from the company’s existing pad, Space Launch Complex 14 (SLC-14). The first flight will carry AstroForge’s Autonomy-1 mission and a Celestis payload, and Stoke plans several Pathfinder missions in 2027 and 2028.

SLC-14 has history: from it, on February 20, 1962, John Glenn was launched on Mercury-Atlas 6 and became the first American to orbit the Earth. Space Launch Delta 45 allocated the complex to Stoke in March 2023. The photograph above is an archive view of the complex from the Mercury era.

On Nova both stages are designed to return and fly again. The first stage is powered by Zenith full-flow staged-combustion engines, while the second carries the Andromeda engine and an actively cooled metallic reentry heat shield. The company was founded in 2019 by Andy Lapsa and Tom Feldman, both former Blue Origin executives, employs about 400 people and is based in Kent, Washington. In 2025 the Space Force placed it among the providers that can compete for national security missions, in Lane 1 of the third phase of the programme, but it can bid only after a successful orbital flight, GeekWire notes.

The Pentagon’s commitment comes less than two months after the $1 billion Series E funding that Stoke announced on September 8, led by Point72 Ventures and Spark Capital. With it the company’s total funds reached $2.3 billion. “Every mature transportation system is built around fully reusable vehicles,” Lapsa said then.

The OSC was created in 2022 to bring private investment into technologies critical to national security and since 2023 has had the authority to make loans and loan guarantees. Space launch is one of the technology categories it supports. In October the office signed a similar conditional commitment of $80 million with Antheia. The Space Force is also turning to the commercial industry, as shown by the six CASR agreements for a commercial reserve, while on October 22 the department finalised with Lockheed Martin the ten-year framework agreement for the F-35, which secures $7 billion of private investment.