Stoke Space ignites its ambitious main engine | Hacker News Reader

Stoke Space ignites its ambitious main engine

arstechnica.com

89 pointsperihelions66 comments

Awesome to hear this was a successful test of a full-flow stage-combustion engine! The space industry desperately needs competition for SpaceX, and this company looks like a great candidate to eventually offer it.

Is anyone else even considering attempting full-flow cycles, besides those two? There's nothing on else on Wikipedia (besides two, long-abandoned research projects).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Staged_combustion_cycle#Full-f...

There is no desparate need for competition.. SpaceX was desparately needed however, and they have unlocked whole new industries and inpspired many

More competition is always good in a free economy, but what is causing a "Desperate" situation? Is the trajectory of SpaceX on a course where they will certainly become a monopoly, with all other space providers being locked out due to economies of scale?

SpaceX is already the world's cheapest launch provider by a significant margin, and transports 90% of the world's tonnage to orbit. That's with a launch platform that costs a bit over a thousand dollars per pound. Once Starship is in production, that will drop to around thirty dollars per pound, while their annual launch capacity increases enormously. Everything about the space industry will change, and we'll be able to do a lot more than we ever have before.

Without another company able to do the same thing, Elon will completely control all that. How desperate that is depends on your opinion of him, I guess.

What is the percentage if you exclude their own Starlink launches? Because it is most of what they launch.

It doesn't matter. Even if Starlink was, by far, the majority of their launches, it still drives high launch cadence, which drives their R&D far faster than everyone else's. Space industry is vulnerable to the vicious cycle of expensive launches leading to expensive, one-off, high-risk missions, leading to high reliability guarantees, leading to even more expensive launches. High launch cadence is an antidote to that, it makes costs fall all across the board.

Couldn't find an easy answer but if you're determined, wikipedia has a complete list of launches, mostly with tonnage:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Falcon_9_and_Falcon_He...

There's someone on Ars Technica that keeps stats.

SpaceX is No1 by far regardless of starlink

The Indians can probably do it cheaper due to lower manpower costs, SpaceX has a hard limit on how low they can go no matter how much automation they throw at it.

As long as they throw away the rocket on each launch, that seems really unlikely. Starship at scale will be down to the cost of fuel and ground services, with just a tiny amount amortized for the rocket itself.

Even Falcon, with only the first stage reused a dozen times or so, is cheaper than anyone else launching today. With cleaner-burning fuel, Starship will be good for hundreds of launches on both stages, with fast turnaround. (And Stoke Space is attempting that too.)

> "I’ve been around long enough to know that any rocket development program is hard, even if you make it as simple as possible," [the Stoke Space CEO] responded. "But this industry is going toward full reusability. To me, that is the inevitable end state. When you start with that north star, any other direction you take is a diversion. If you start designing anything else, it’s not something where you can back into full reusability at any point. It means you’ll have to stop and start over to climb the mountain."

I wonder whether this is really true in the long term. Their current "Nova" rocket is projected to deliver only five tons to LEO, so I assume they eventually want to go bigger. The question is whether their current design can be scaled up to a significantly larger vehicle. Otherwise they will also need to "start over", just like the other companies that are currently working on partial reusability will need to come up with different designs once they go to full reusability.

The X-prize Lunar Lander Challenge was an interesting alternative way to get to reusable rockets.

There were rules to take off from one pad and land on another pad while hovering 90 seconds. And the higher level challenge had 180 seconds of hovering. And then the rocket must fly back (after refueling).

This doesn't need any complicated launch ranges and permits like "real" rockets. But the delta vee capability needed to hover that long is still significant.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Lander_Challenge

I think it's a shame it didn't directly lead to viable businesses. Armadillo Aerospace and Masten Space and others acted as an inspiration though. You can make rocket flights reliable and relatively routine.

If they could have made that work as a business, say, first for sounding rockets, then they could have scaled that up to orbital.

Back in the 2008 era there wasn't that much VC money floating around either...

It certainly would have been far more effective for NASA to spend money on private companies instead of spending those billions on their Constellation program. Even today, NASA invests far more money into the in-house project SLS/Orion than into rockets by private space companies.

So there was enough money, it was just spent inefficiently by a government agency.

Yes, definitely, but that's politically hard though. Ie the NASA administrator can't do that on their own. EELV:s had supposed "black zones". Ares I was the thing. And so on. Even when Dragon and Cygnus were a thing, SLS had to be developed.

The whole thing that differentiates this company from the dozen other seemingly-interchangeable new-space entrants is the novel technology they've developed to facilitate reuse. Even if it were the case that there isn't a market for five tons to LEO (and to be clear, Rocket Lab seems to be doing decent business launching a lot less) and all this was was a technology demonstrator, why would you build a technology demonstrator that doesn't show off the thing that makes your company interesting?

RocketLab isn't doing decent buissness launching less. Launch is a small part of their revenue and the make low or negative profit.

They are developing an 8t to orbit rocket.

The market today cares about constellation. Its about launch rate and cost.

5 tons is more then enough for the types of sats that go into all the constellations.

5 tons doesn't seem to be enough.

> Amazon Kuiper is positioning to compete with SpaceX’s Starlink broadband constellation but it would not rule out seeking launch services from its competitor given the tight deadline, Limp said. “We are open to talking to SpaceX. You’d be crazy not to, given their track record.”

> The Falcon 9 [22.8 tons to LEO], however, is not as large as Amazon would like it to be in order to get maximum bang for its launch buck, as Kuiper satellites are larger than Starlink’s.

> “I would say Falcon 9 is probably at the low end of the capacity that we need,” Limp said. Perhaps a better option would be Falcon Heavy or the much larger Starship, which is still in development. As Starship transitions to production readiness, “that becomes a very viable candidate for us as well.”

https://spacenews.com/as-clock-ticks-on-amazons-constellatio...

> The Falcon 9 [22.8 tons to LEO], however, is not as large as Amazon would like it to be

At the end of the day its about price and launch rate. An individual sat isn't 5t.

I think this is more marketing speak to pretend they had technical reasons not to pick Falcon 9.

Maybe, but they also say Starship would be the best option. There is no way Nova or any other rocket could compete here. Nova would only be good relative to Starship for launching individual smaller payloads into specific orbits, so not for satellite constellations.

Stoke employee here.

These are the hardest working and most intelligent people I’ve ever worked with. I truly believe we are about to revolutionize this industry very, very soon, at a similar-to-greater magnitude than SpaceX has managed.

If you’re at all interested in joining our mission, please get in touch. We’re still in our infancy and have plenty of seats that need butts on all sorts of teams. Even the Fusion and Data Engineering teams are growing, where prior aerospace experience is not at all required.

How do you compete with SpaceX? They're titans. They have the customers, contracts, and revenues, and it seems like they could build your design while still sending off tons of payloads using their existing infrastructure.

What makes your product so different, and how do you grow to anything close to their revenue and volume without them eating you first?

I ask these sincerely and in earnest! You're working on such a fascinating and awe-inspiring problem. I wish you the best of luck, because the field needs competition.

Everyday Astronaut did a fantastic video of his visit to Stoke Space, that goes into a lot of detail on what makes them so interesting. It's a really nifty design, and they do the same kind of rapid development that SpaceX does.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EY8nbSwjtEY

Given that Starship is so big, I think it could work out for Stoke to start with a smaller but fully reusable rocket, giving cheap rides to people who don't want to rideshare. Plus, governments tend to be interested in having multiple launch providers.

I hope Tim comes through again soon. It's awesome how much has changed since his last visit.

Aside from anything else, if they can position themselves as a clear second in terms of space innovation then that guarantees them billions in government contracts.

The space force is willing to pay a premium to avoid anyone getting a monopoly, we see that with the ULA contracts today.

Their fully reusable rocket concept is pretty cool. Like a mini Starship.

More competition is always good, glad to see them progress quite fast.

I much prefer their design to starship. It's optimising for the hardest part of the trip: re-entry.. Also re-entering like Apollo and not like the space shuttle is a good thing imo. It doesnt rely on an ablative heat shield or tiles, also it doesnt have extremely heavy / complex / vulnerable actuated fins yet it can get lift and steer itself simply with it's shape and by rotating the whole craft like Apollo.

SpaceX is a mix of mindblowing engineering with sometimes baffling decisions. I can never help but wonder how much input Elon has, and if he is responsible for all those questionable choices, as he honestly appears to be a bit of an idiot.

I've been following Starship's development avidly, but knowing he's involved always makes me cringe a little.

> SpaceX is a mix of mindblowing engineering with sometimes baffling decisions. I can never help but wonder how much input Elon has, and if he is responsible for all those questionable choices, as he honestly appears to be a bit of a idiot.

Let me get this straight. You believe that Stoke space is somehow the near perfect design. The designer or Shuttle and Starship were probably idiots for not coming up with the same ideas as Stoke. But maybe the reason that they are so dumb, is simply because Musk is part of the design team.

Maybe you should consider, just maybe, that if Starship isn't exactly like Stoke spaces design, it could have actual reasons. Maybe, just maybe the most successful rocket company in history had actual technical reason for their design choices. But no that couldn't be it, could it?

But instead of asking the saying 'Stoke Space design seems really awesome, I wonder why SpaceX made difference choices', you just jumped to 'well Musk is cringe and therefore that must be the reason'.

"You believe that Stoke space is somehow the near perfect design"

- I said I much prefer it to starship, not that it's near perfect.

"The designer or Shuttle and Starship were probably idiots"

- I dont know much about the design of Starship, that stuff is not in the public domain atm. But the space shuttle designers were not idiots, they just had to deal with some impossible requirements from higher up. The space shuttle as-built has some clearly bad design elements (eg. the shuttle itself not being on top of the stack at launch, as it was in the original design). It had a famously long and torturous design process with many different stakeholders all wanting it to be capable of wildly different missions. Just one example: https://youtu.be/_q2i0eu35aY?feature=shared

So one could say management meddling with the design is what killed the space shuttle. I am wondering is the same meddling happening in SpaceX?

Starship famously has one mandated mission: colonizing Mars. Most design decisions revolve around it.

On Musk making Starship decisions: "Elon’s direct engineering management style may help him maintain alignment between Mars-oriented designs and the greater defense-oriented requirements of an SDI system"

https://grook.ai/saved_session?id=e269e88a7b1a71eff4f176c864...

Im just baffled that you seem uninterested in actually consider technical reasons of why Starship is not the same as Stoke space. The only thing you seem to wonder about if it is managment meddling.

Of course we dont know exactly why each decition was taken, but there are some pretty clear technical reasons that one could think about before using 'cringe' as an explnaition.

This comment is an excellent example of ideology superseding real world results.

Just an incredible public display of cognitive dissonance.

Hey, we all received the memo - Musk is evil now. So please, play your part.

All jokes aside - having different implementations/ideas competing for similar goals is nothing but good. We cannot pretend to have "min-maxed" space travel or rocketry at this point in time - so there's still lots of ideas to experiment with.

Any organization that can successfully design, assemble, test, and launch a new rocket into space is a huge victory for the US, space exploration, and ultimately the world. Making space more accessible is likely to lead to all kinds of new discoveries and technology that benefits earth and beyond.

Starship is still in development and is running into significant delays and they have yet to show even a depot, tanker and lunar lander mockup. What real world results are you talking about? It is not like the current version of starship could deploy a payload because they removed the payload doors to make reentry easier. The last test flight took many steps back to test upper stage reuse, which is a capability that won't be needed any time soon and could have been tested in parallel with other changes. Sure, with every test they are incrementally developing the rocket, but from my perspective the progress between launches is the same as if they hadn't done any test launches. There is no magical development speedup coming from their approach, mostly because they are taking many detours. The attempt to launch without a deluge system was just a waste of time and their first rocket. They could be moving faster, but they don't.

To add & also imo, it's probably good thing that it's not designed to mimic old stuffs. Biplanes with train car fuselages and automobiles with horse carriage aesthetics went out of fashion quick. Space transport systems with a cargo plane design didn't work all that well too.

Meanwhile, if we look at Apollo style reentry, it just works. From first time and every time and even for interplanetary entries. Clearly that's something that isn't broken and not in need of a fix.

"It's optimising for the hardest part of the trip: re-entry."

Is it really the hardest part?

I would say that for fully reusable rockets, the hardest part is quick turnaround. For future space activities, it will be a huge economic difference if you can send the ship back in, say, 12 hours vs. 120 hours.

I agree with this, I may have said the same thing.. But I was thinking that the tech used for re-entry is what tends to increase the turnaround time (Eg. ablative heat shields, tiles). Making something that's rapidly re-usable which can also withstand re-entry from orbital speeds is probably the greatest challenge in this domain.

The shuttle was originally envisaged to be cheap and rapidly re-usable for the time. As built it didnt turn out that way, it would have been overall cheaper and probably faster to launch a fully un-reusable rocket than a shuttle.

Yeah, my guess is that quick turnaround is a function of mainly two variables: a good protection of the ship during re-entry and very reliable engines that require little to none manual checking and can withstand lower thousands of cycles before needing refurbishment.

Of those two, I am fairly sure that SpaceX can produce great engines. The Raptors are not quite there yet, but their 4th or 5th iteration will likely be extremely good.

Not so sure about the heat shields. Much less aggregated corporate experience there.

It was quickly taken down, but there was a video on YouTube from someone who got hold both of a Space Shuttle and a Starship heat shield tile. He analyzed it with a microscope. He found that the material was nearly identical. I do wonder why SpaceX thinks they can make a ceramic heat shield work when it needed lots of checks and refurbishment for the Space Shuttle. Recently Musk even said they will add an ablative heat shield in certain areas.

On the other hand, the at least the reusability of the lower stage shouldn't be a problem.

There are quite a large number of parameters other than the material, surely. The whole design is different.

Not at all. The tiles just consists of two layers. The main body and the dark layer on top. According to the electron microscope analysis, the two tiles were mostly the same.

I mean more, the size and shape of the ship, the size/shape/thickness of the tiles, the attachment method, the substrate material, the flight profile...

I'm not seeing where SpaceX could have achieved a major innovation here that solves the problems the Space Shuttle had with the heat shield. I think the latter used glue rather than pins, but probably not because the Space Shuttle people couldn't make pins. If it was that easy...

Those details could affect the heat flux and temperatures the material is exposed to. The two spacecraft have very different designs.

I guess one advantage of SpaceX compared to NASA is that the former are very trial and error based in their design, so they can iterate much more. NASA tends to design and plan everything in advance and only build it at the end. So when the Space Shuttle reusability didn't quite pan out, they couldn't easily change things up.

From what I understand, they are trying to keep their unique type shape count very low relative to the shuttle, which should make tile replacement a lot cheaper. Nonetheless, the tiles seem like the weakest aspect of the whole design. Recall that the early proposals didn't have tiles at all, so the tiles existing now is already and acknowledgement that not everything is going according to the ideal path.

I wonder whether they considered using a metallic heat shield with heat resistant alloys. The cancelled VentureStar space plane was planned to use this approach:

https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20040095922/downloads/20...

They were originally hoping to use transpiration cooling, the tiles ended up being the fallback.

Yeah, but it isn't clear whether they ever considered a metallic heat shield. At some point in the past it was considered an improvement over ceramic tiles, since the VentureStar was planned as a Space Shuttle successor that fixed its shortcomings.

Blue Origin was founded before SpaceX by a rich guy that had far more money than Elon Musk did. To cringe at SpaceX leadership is idiotic; the leadership is what made the difference between a company that has dominated the space industry (putting even every single national program around the world combined to shame) and one that has never put a single object into orbit.

Not money. Not timing. Not even the engineers, because Blue Origin had every opportunity to hire the best. It was the leadership.

Let me answer that for you: it's well-documented and confirmed by many insiders, including Tom Mueller and Gwynne Shotwell, that a) Musk has always had a lot of technical input, and b) he is responsible for the good choices that made SpaceX into what it is today.

Of course the truth falls afoul of the "Musk is evil now" memo mentioned downthread, so you keep believing what you believe.

It fascinates me how people can turn "Musk has a toxic personality" into "Musk can only be the money man, must be stupid, and cannot have any technical skills." As if the tech industry hasn't already had a proud tradition of brilliant asshole CEOs named Jobs, Gates, Zuckerberg, and Ellison just to name a few.

Being an asshole isn't required for success, but it unfortunately also doesn't necessarily inhibit it either.

I really hope this one works out and scales. The only rocket company besides SpaceX that’s really developing something novel, at least that I’m aware of.

Rocket Lab and Relativity Space are also doing pretty cool work. Rocket Lab is the only other company to successfully reach orbit, they're the first to make an electric-pump fed rocket engine, and their upcoming Neutron rocket is supposed to be mostly reusable and does several things better than the Falcon 9. Relativity is using 3D printing to manufacture most of the rocket. RFA (Rocket Factory Augsburg) is also interesting, they're not doing anything novel AFAIK but they're using cheap parts from the automotive industry to bring down prices.

Firefly and Astra have both reached orbit IIRC

Astra is barely holding on by a thread though. Their main hope of survival is their hall-effect propulsion engines.

Not developing a launcher but Gravitics https://www.gravitics.com/ is another company doing something in different way (Gary Hudson, if you know the name, is on the team)

I would say the Stoke Space rocket is in some sense more novel than Starship, apart from its size. We have never seen anything like the Stoke upper stage before. Which might be a financial problem, as developing such an ambitious design is likely expensive, and as a startup their funds are limited. A partly reusable design like Neutron (Rocket Lab) or Terran R (Relativity Space) is more conventional and probably cheaper to develop.

This segment [1] where they mention their ability to deliver assets from any location to any other location on Earth, with vertical, surface landing, makes me wonder whether they're eventually planning to focus on military contracts.

[1] https://youtu.be/fcLuugmHV90?t=71

They don’t seem to mention how to get off the ground again after such a landing.

If that requires building a launch platform and/or shipping in a first stage, or moving the vehicle out over ground towards a launch facility, such landings will be expensive (even can end up being one way trips), making them economical for very few jobs.

The punchline is "from many location to any location". They're not saying they can launch from any location. What it likely means is they can offer towing for a broken satellite back to any secret hangars in Nevada, and deposit returned for intact tow vehicles.

I do wonder what it is even possibly useful for. Asset transport from orbit sounds sci-fi.

With the advent of the space force, pretty much every space company is targeting military contracts (at least partially) since that is a huge source of government funding

The advent of the Space Force is not going to be a watershed in DOD contracting; the services are nothing but force providers who fulfill the requirements of the combatant commands. Demand for DOD space assets is merely going to be managed by the Space Force now in service to already-existing COCOM requirements; the demand signal is what it is.

Those contracts were happening pre-Space Force. Space Force's mission existed inside USAF (specifically, but other services and TLAs as well) prior to USSF being created.

I love Stoke (and I sorta really want to work there). It has like a startup vibe to it, but with some seriously advanced technology. Dogs in the workplace, and also two enormous, expensive, metal 3d printers.

Shout-out to Joshua and co for letting me look around.

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