The US Department of War’s Office of Strategic Capital has signed a conditional commitment for a $150 million loan to Stoke Space Technologies, to help the company build a second launch pad at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. The department said the commitment supports the expansion of US launch capacity needed for commercial and national security missions, and Jordan Sebold, the office’s senior managing director for investments, said added launch infrastructure would enhance the capacity and resilience of the commercial space industrial base.
The loan is not final. Stoke must still meet financial, legal, technical and due diligence conditions before closing, and the federal money is to be paired with private capital to pay for the pad. The new pad is intended for Stoke’s Nova Block 2, a fully reusable rocket designed to carry up to 15 metric tons to low Earth orbit, five times the capacity of the Nova Pathfinder vehicle Stoke plans to fly first from its existing pad in early 2027. Block 2 is slated to debut in 2029.
The commitment follows the initial closing in September of Stoke’s roughly $1 billion Series E round, which the company said brought total capital raised to about $2.3 billion. The Office of Strategic Capital was created in 2022 to draw private investment into technologies critical to national security, and Congress gave it loan and loan guarantee authority the following year. No interest rate, maturity or total pad cost was disclosed in the announcement.