My take on the new Stoke Space Nova Block 2.
It is really a three stage rocket now.
Stage 1 and stage 2 come home. The last stage does not.
Pathfinder still has that neat reusable fairing sitting on a tapered, capsule-like upper stage. Fairing opens, stays with the vehicle, flies home with the heat shield. Proper full reuse.
Block 2 deletes the taper. Cylindrical tanks. Room for a proper 5 metre fairing. That is the upgrade customers asked for. Volume, not just mass.
That 5 m fairing is the third stage. Traditional clamshell. Separates. At least early on it looks expendable. Early write-ups even talk about the halves falling in the ocean. They may fish them out later like Falcon 9. They have not said that is the plan from flight one.
So what do you actually get?
Fourteen Zenith engines on the booster. Twelve independent Andromeda engines on the upper stage. Both stages designed to land, refit, refuel, refly. Roughly 15 tonnes to LEO fully reusable. About 4 tonnes to GTO. First Block 2 flight targeted 2029. Pathfinder still first up, early 2027.
The clever bit is they kept the base-first reentry hemisphere on the upper stage. Satellites do not have to be redesigned around a weird payload bay. You can have the familiar 5 m volume and still bring the expensive bits home.
Is it 100 percent reusable hardware every flight? Stages yes. Fairing, not yet. That is the honest read of what they published this week.
Still a big step. Full reuse of the hard parts is the game. The fairing is the cheap bit you can argue about later.
What do you reckon? Did they trade the attached fairing for constellation volume, or will they recover those halves sooner than we think?