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Commercial Space Flight General / Re: Stoke Space Technologies: General Company and Development Updates and Discussions
« Last post by JEF_300 on 02/18/2026 04:31 pm »Can the upper stage of the Stoke vehicle be made into a capsule? Is it large enough?
Three ton payload seems lean.
Future alternate size versions of the stages seem likely to increase potential for human capability. I think Lapsa hinted at it if I remember correctly.
I think you could do a crew module for at least 1-2 astronauts in the 3mT capacity and volume of their initial Nova vehicle, especially if you're willing to lean-in on leveraging the capabilities of an RLV upper stage rather than just doing a plain vanilla capsule like you would on an expendable-upper-stage launch vehicle. That said, larger follow-on vehicles would move it from "yeah you can probably make this work with sufficient cleverness" to being obviously doable.
~Jon
The Gemini spacecraft was in the 3-4 tonne range, and that includes the heatshield, and parachutes, and entire adapator (service) module, all of which are jobs that the Nova upper stage could do.
Mind you, it probably can't do all of those jobs at once; I'm almost positive their down-mass is less than their up-mass. But since the down-mass should mostly be determined by the final landing burn... for an extreme example, the crew compartment could ride to orbit on Nova, use Nova as it's service module while in orbit, use Nova's heatshield for reentry, and then detach and deploy parachutes before the landing burn. How many more people could you fit in a vehicle the size of Gemini, if it didn't need it's adaptor module or heatshield? I think 4 person crews like Dragon would totally be in the cards. If you want to do more than ~6 orbit tourist flights, you'll need a docking adaptor, which I suspect would knock it down to a 3 person crew.
You would of course never ever actually build this vehicle. For many reasons. Not the least of which is that Nova's upper stage is hydrolox, which boils-off, so your time on-orbit would be like ~12 hours before you were forced to come down due to low fuel / heatshield coolant.
But it's a fun thought.
EDIT: I have now read the rest of the thread between these posts I'm replying to and this one, and I see that you guys covered most of these points already (although coming from the Mercury angle instead of Gemini, for some reason). So, kudos.
