The Pentagon is paying for a second launch pad before the first rocket has flown. Stoke Space’s hiring shows a top-tier launch team, and a factory team that is barely visible.
Stoke Space has never flown a rocket, and the Pentagon is already helping it pay for a second place to launch one. On 26 October the Pentagon’s Office of Strategic Capital offered the company a conditional $150 million loan to build another pad at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, sized for a vehicle that is not due to fly until 2029. In fact, the first pad is still waiting for the debut of a smaller rocket, Nova Pathfinder, now expected in early 2027.
It is a striking vote of confidence in a company with no flight record, and it is not the only one. In September Stoke Space raised $1 billion, taking its total to $2.3 billion, and said the money would bring Pathfinder to flight, speed up its larger successor and build the production capacity to fly both. Investors and the Pentagon are paying, ahead of the first launch, for what is meant to come after it: a factory, a flight rate, a business.
The U.S. government interest is strategic rather than sentimental. The Pentagon’s Office of Strategic Capital, set up in 2022 to lend to companies whose technology matters to national security, has made conditional $150 million commitments to three space firms in as many weeks: Stoke Space, Rocket Lab and the satellite-tracking company LeoLabs.
The backdrop is a looming shortage of launch capacity. SpaceX, on whose rockets the Pentagon leans heavily, has said it intends to wind down Falcon 9 in favour of Starship, and Ars Technica reported that it has stopped taking commercial Falcon 9 orders for flights after 2028. The Pentagon plainly wants more medium-lift providers than SpaceX, and it is lending against flight rate more than first flight. Its own release on the Stoke Space loan speaks of high-cadence access to orbit, and the Rocket Lab loan is explicitly meant to speed up launches once Neutron has flown.
Whether that confidence is earned is partly a question about people. Zeki Data mapped the workforces of these launch companies and when we set Stoke Space beside SpaceX, Blue Origin, Rocket Lab, Relativity Space and Skyroot Aerospace, two quite different pictures emerged. One is of a company that has pulled off a remarkable feat of recruitment. The other is of a company that, so far as its hiring reveals, has barely begun on the business of making rockets repeatable.
Start with the feat. In the three years Stoke Space hired 11 people from Blue Origin, which is also based in Kent, Washington, for every one it lost in the other direction. From SpaceX the ratio is 22 to one, and Relativity Space, the other prominent launch startup still waiting to reach orbit, has not taken a single employee.
Stoke Space was founded by Blue Origin alumni, so a certain gravitational pull is to be expected. But three in five of the Blue Origin people it has hired had spent five years or more at the company, which looks less like an exchange of favours and more like a raid on veterans. The two largest launch companies in the market are losing experienced engineers to a firm that has yet to put anything in orbit, and getting almost nothing back.
Stoke Space hires from Blue Origin and SpaceX at 11 and 22 times the rate it loses people to them
Hires from each peer for every departure to that peer, October 2023 to October 2026, interns excluded
Source: Zeki, Stoke Space Diagnostic, 26 October 2026
The payoff shows in the quality of the team. On Zeki’s composite measure of engineering strength, which weights experience at 60 per cent and education and recognition at 40, Stoke Space scores 0.84. Only Blue Origin (0.87) and Rocket Lab (0.85) do better. SpaceX, which flew 165 Falcon 9s in 2025, according to Ars Technica, scores 0.79. A company with no launches to its name has assembled an engineering bench that rates above that of the busiest launch provider on earth.
Its weak spot is the one thing a company cannot manufacture for itself: a record of flying. Only half of Stoke Space’s engineers have spent a year or more at a company that has flown a launch vehicle, against nearly nine in ten at Blue Origin and SpaceX. It is closing the gap the only way open to a firm that has yet to fly, by borrowing the experience from those that have.
Elite engineering, with one conspicuous gap: flying
Flight-proven share of engineers (%) and composite engineering team quality score
Flight-proven means at least 12 months at a company that has flown a launch vehicle. Source: Zeki, Stoke Space Diagnostic, 26 October 2026
The launch team tells the same story in miniature. Launch and flight-operations staff make up 9.2 per cent of Stoke Space’s workforce, a bigger share than at any of its peers, and 82 per cent of them have worked at a company with an orbital rocket. Yet only one in seven has been at Stoke Space for more than two years, less than half the proportion at every peer. Think of a pit crew recruited from rival teams on the morning of the race: each member has done the job before, but none has done it alongside the others. That is a reasonable condition before a first flight, and a first campaign is the cure for it.
The trouble is that a first flight is not the point. The hard part of the rocket business is the second launch, and the third, and the hundredth, and the people who make those possible rarely appear in a company’s launch-day photographs. They sit in supply chain and procurement, in programme management and in quality assurance, deciding whether the next vehicle arrives on schedule and whether it works when it does. On this evidence Stoke Space has barely started to hire. We could find no one with a supply-chain or procurement title. Programme managers make up 0.4 per cent of the workforce, against 1.9 per cent at SpaceX and 6.4 per cent at Blue Origin. And Stoke Space is not currently advertising for either.
The unglamorous half of a rocket company is close to empty
Share of workforce holding the job title (%)
Based on job titles, so directional rather than definitive. Source: Zeki, Stoke Space Diagnostic, 26 October 2026
Job titles are a blunt instrument, and the fairest objection is that Stoke Space cares a great deal about production. It built its own manufacturing-execution software, Boltline, which tracks every part and procedure through a build and is now sold to other hardware makers. But software that records a build is not the same as people who source the parts, run the programme and sign off on quality. Several of the company’s open roles, a technical programme manager among them, are for Boltline’s commercial side rather than for Nova. Of the 71 open roles in our October snapshot, 41 are technical and 11 more are technicians, machinists or fabricators. Almost none are for the work that decides whether a rocket arrives on time.
It would be easy to file all of this under Block 2, a problem for 2029. Stoke Space’s own timetable says otherwise. It plans to fly Pathfinder on several missions through 2027 and 2028 while the larger rocket is still in development, which means the test of repeatability begins next year, on the small vehicle, and not at the end of the decade.
The repeat test starts with Pathfinder, not Block 2
Sources: Zeki, Stoke Space Diagnostic, 26 October 2026; Stoke Space schedule as reported by Via Satellite and Starlust
The customer will not wait either. Under Lane 1 of the Space Force’s national security launch programme, the route by which newer rockets can win military work, Stoke Space cannot be chosen for a single task order until it has completed one successful launch. After that it will compete for roughly 30 missions through mid-2029 against SpaceX, which had won every task order awarded as of early this year. A first flight earns Stoke Space a seat at that table. Cadence decides how long it keeps the chair.
The industry has a habit of burying companies that clear the first hurdle and trip on the second. Virgin Orbit completed four successful launches, then lost a rocket in January 2023, failed to raise the money to survive the setback and filed for bankruptcy that April. Quartz had judged that high costs and an inability to keep a regular cadence stopped it gaining traction. Astra delivered customer satellites to orbit in 2022, a year after telling investors to expect 165 launches in 2024; it has since returned to private ownership. Even Rocket Lab, the most prolific American launcher after SpaceX, said on 14 October that Neutron’s debut will slip to 2027 because of a manufacturing issue. Reaching orbit is a milestone. Flying often enough to pay for the rocket is a business.
None of this is an argument that Stoke Space will fail. It has done the hard thing first, persuading some of the most experienced launch engineers in the business to leave the two most successful rocket companies for one that has not yet flown. What remains is to show that it can also hire the people who will never appear in a launch webcast. Two signs will tell. One is whether a senior supply-chain or programme-management hire arrives before Pathfinder flies. The other is where that person comes from: the Blue Origin and SpaceX pool that has served Stoke Space so far, or somewhere the company has never recruited before.
Investors have bought the sequel. For now, the organisation chart is still making the first film.
About this analysis: drawn from the Zeki Diagnostic Report on Stoke Space, October 2026, built from publicly available profile data for Stoke Space, SpaceX, Blue Origin, Rocket Lab, Relativity Space and Skyroot Aerospace. Hire and departure ratios cover October 2023 to October 2026 and exclude interns. Function measures are based on job titles. The full diagnostic also covers hiring mix, research record and leadership.
Citations: Via Satellite (Series E, Block 2 timing); Air & Space Forces Magazine (Pentagon loan); Breaking Defense (Lane 1 terms); Air & Space Forces Magazine (launch-capacity concerns, Rocket Lab loan); Via Satellite (Virgin Orbit).