I'm also confused by the present tense being used there by the OP. "It's also the first." So it already exists? It has been tested to orbit and back? Doubtful. Do they really think they will beat Starship to orbit? Starship will certainly be added to the list of launch vehicles to offer "down-mass".

The OP's whole comment fails to mention Starship a single time, which is probably not a competitor you want to bring up with investors since it is designed to do just about everything, but acting like SpaceX hasn't been publicly developing Starship for years now is weird to me. Starship development is moving fast.

Regardless of the above, I am really excited to see more activity in the New Space scene. The market will be so big that it shouldn't be a winner-takes-all market... there seems to be plenty of room for more companies to grow the space market faster. The more the merrier.

I just want people to be transparent about current realities... and using present tense for something that seemingly doesn't actually exist, ignoring the existence of Starship, claiming to be the first launch vehicle to offer "down-mass"? hmm.

Thanks for correctly noting the tense - I have revised to future tense and apologize for any misgivings.

Starship is amazing and we are huge fans! That is an enormous vehicle though, designed for a different purpose. It is like comparing a freight train to a Sprinter van, if that makes sense.

As a life-long space fan, and as a SpaceX fan going back many years, I'm super happy to see any and all activity in this area. For example, I was pumped to hear that Bezos was going to turn his full attention to Blue Origin!

> [Starship] is an enormous vehicle though, designed for a different purpose. It is like comparing a freight train to a Sprinter van, if that makes sense.

It is definitely enormous, but in my mind, its most fundamental purpose is to minimize cost to orbit. The other missions: landing on Earth, Mars and the Moon: are all dependent on and follow from achieving that main goal.

Musk always over promises, but there's at least a good chance that SpaceX will get Starship/Superheavy launch costs down below the million dollars per flight level.

In that eventually happens, what would Stoke's economic model look like?

Once again, I was delighted to read about this, and truly wish your company the best possible outcomes!

Sorry for the confusion! There are plenty of space vehicles that have had "down-mass" capacity - Gemini, Soyuz, Apollo, Dragon, Shuttle, X-37B, etc. They are all spacecraft, although Shuttle is a close in-between. The distinction here is this is a true upper stage, which can also return items from orbit.

We are looking to serve a complementary market to New Glenn and are not planning to fly on that vehicle.

>> X-37B

So the X-37 has a down-mass capacity. That means it has either docked or at least intercepted with something else in space close enough to transfer material. I was unaware that it could perform such maneuvers. I certainly haven't read anything in the open source about such missions.