Manifest Update: Nova Pathfinder Flight 1
Today, we're sharing the customer manifest for the first flight of Nova Pathfinder, Nova's first orbital configuration, targeted for early 2027 from Space Launch Complex 14 (SLC-14) at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.
Nova Pathfinder upper stage flight article #1 during a fit check test
Who's Flying
AstroForge will fly Autonomy-1, a demonstration of its Solo autonomous spacecraft intelligence system. After separation, the spacecraft will operate its entire mission without commands from the ground, including autonomously supporting NASA Goddard’s COMPASS heliophysics payload. Additionally, Celestis will fly their Infinite Flight payload on the mission.
What Flight 1 Is Built To Do
Flight 1 carries customer payloads to orbit and gives us the first integrated flight data on the hardest full reuse technologies that define our Nova system, including the Zenith full-flow staged combustion engines on Stage 1, and Andromeda actively cooled engine and metallic re-entry heat shield on Stage 2.
Stoke employees inside Nova Pathfinder Stage 1 structure
With the team moving through final integration in Washington and preparing for hardware delivery to SLC-14, we remain on track for first flight in the first part of 2027.
The Flight Plan From Here
We plan to fly multiple Pathfinder missions in 2027 and 2028. For a deeper look at the vehicle and the roadmap, see Scaling Nova.
About Stoke Space
Stoke is building fully and rapidly reusable launch vehicles designed to provide reliable, on-demand transportation to, through, and from space. Its vehicles are designed for rapid turnaround and high-frequency operation, dramatically lowering the cost of access while expanding the range of missions that launch systems can serve. Stoke’s technology development has been supported by NASA, the U.S. Space Force, the Defense Innovation Unit, the National Science Foundation, and other commercial and government partners.