Stoke Space
Andy Lapsa attended the best aerospace engineering schools. He then worked very hard to advance the development of some of the most advanced rocket engines in the world at Blue Origin. But in 2019, after a decade in the industry, he felt like the future of spaceflight he was aiming for — rapidly reusable rockets — wasn’t much closer.
“It’s the inevitable end-state,” he said of cheap rockets that can relaunch, land and fly the next day. “It’s going to happen. It’s just a matter of who does it and when they do it.”
His vision for the future is not unique. It is shared by two of the richest people in the world, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. Lapsa worked for one of them, first helping Bezos develop the powerful BE-4 engine and then as director of Blue Origin’s BE-3 program.
“I love Jeff’s vision of space,” Lapsa said in an interview with Ars. “I’ve been working closely with him on several projects for a while and I’m actually 100 percent on board with the vision. Other than that, I think I’d just say I’ll let their execution history speak for itself, and I thought we could go faster.” .”
This is a polite way of saying that more than two decades after Bezos founded Blue Origin, the company has not yet entered orbit. So three years ago, Lapsa, who is in his late thirties, and Tom Feldman, another rocket scientist there who had just turned 30, started looking around for a place to make a difference faster. They were animated not so much by a midlife crisis as by a desire to advance the era of cheap, regular access to space and the future that could open up to humanity.
Looking around
The pair of propulsion engineers looked around the US industry, which consisted of dozens of rocket companies. One of their friends, a former Blue Origin engineer named Tim Ellis, co-founded a Los Angeles-based company called Relativity Space in 2016. They looked closely at Relativity, but at the time the company hadn’t fully committed to the Terran-R rocket, a fully reusable, medium-lift rocket. Lapsa and Feldman weren’t too optimistic about additive manufacturing or pushing the boundaries of 3D printing an entire rocket.
“I think the additive manufacturing of a full rocket is new, but you want to choose the manufacturing tools that make sense, and you want to let the best answer win,” Lapsa said. “And I think their approach is a little too one-sided.”
Stoke Space
Finally, they considered SpaceX. Lapsa said he and Feldman were looking for three key ingredients in a business: fast, reusable rockets; the right engineering team; and a history of ‘ordinary execution’. SpaceX pretty much had it all, as the company’s primary focus was on the revolutionary, reusable Starship rocket. It possessed arguably the largest and most talented team of rocket engineers in the world, and none flew more or less dazzlingly.
And yet it was nothing to them.
“They have an amazing history of execution, no doubt, of awe-inspiring things that have absolutely transformed our industry,” Lapsa said. “But I do think there’s room for a different style of business. We talk a lot with people who come out of SpaceX after three, five, 10 or 15 years, and they’re shells of their old selves. They’re burned out.”
So in late 2019, Lapsa and Feldman decided to start their own company, Stoke Space. Neither had any experience raising money or running a business. They had no plan and no specific design for their rocket in mind. Rather, they strongly believed that the future they wanted was not going to happen, but it was up for grabs.
“We took a plunge and jumped off a cliff,” Lapsa said.
