Nova Stage 1 Completes Proto-Qualification Testing
Every ambitious hardware program has a handful of moments where years of design, analysis, manufacturing, test planning, and operational discipline converge into a single question: does the hardware perform the way the team intended?
For Nova’s first stage, we just answered an important part of that question.
Over the past three weeks at our Moses Lake Test Site (MLTS), the Stoke team successfully completed Stage 1 proto-qualification testing for Nova. This campaign verified 46 structural test objectives across the vehicle, while also exercising critical fluid systems, avionics, software, ground systems, and operations procedures.
This is a major step toward flight.
Structural qualification is one of the most demanding phases in launch vehicle development. Rockets are lightweight by design, but they must also survive extreme loads, cryogenic fluids, pressurization cycles, dynamic environments, transportation, handling, and the many realities of operating large flight hardware in the real world. The margin between “light enough to fly” and “robust enough to survive” is narrow, and proving that margin requires disciplined testing at increasing levels of complexity.
This is also the phase where new rockets often reveal their hardest problems. In recent years and months, the industry has experienced losses of early flight tanks, interstages, and other primary structures during qualification and acceptance campaigns; each one a stark reminder of just how difficult and unforgiving this stage of launch vehicle development can be. Against that backdrop, completing Nova Stage 1 proto-qualification testing cleanly is a significant achievement.
During this campaign, the team filled both tanks above their maximum expected pressure conditions, demonstrated automated pressure control across a range of fill levels, and operated the vehicle through challenging environmental conditions, including hurricane-force winds and a severe lightning storm. More than just a successful structural test campaign, the result was a broader demonstration that Nova’s hardware, software, ground systems, and operations approach are maturing together.
This milestone is a testament to the team behind Nova. Success in testing comes from a combination of engineering rigor, operational discipline, curiosity, and attention to detail. For weeks, our team worked overnight shifts at a remote test site, methodically stepping through objectives, watching the data, challenging assumptions, and keeping the vehicle safe.
Fully reusable rockets are the best (and perhaps the only) path to radically improving access to and from space and making transportation to orbit dramatically more available, responsive, and affordable. Achieving that future means building a system capable of reaching any orbit, at any time, with the reliability and operational cadence that customers can depend on.
For now, this is a moment to recognize how far Nova has come. Stage 1 proto-qualification is complete, and each milestone brings Stoke one step closer to making that vision real.
About Stoke Space
Stoke is scaling the space economy by providing lower-cost, on-demand transport to, through and from space. It’s developing the fully and rapidly reusable Nova rocket designed to operate with aircraft-like frequency. Stoke’s technology development has been funded by the U.S. Space Force, DIU, NASA, the National Science Foundation, and other government and private partners.
