Stoke Space announced Tuesday that it has raised another significant round of funding, $1 billion, as it makes a final push toward its debut launch next year. The Washington-based launch company also revealed plans for a larger medium-lift vehicle.

With the Series E funding round, co-led by Point72 Ventures and Spark Capital, Stoke Space brought its total amount of capital raised to $2.3 billion, a staggering amount for a company that has yet to attempt an orbital launch.

The quantity of new funding will enable the company to accelerate work on a larger "Block 2" version of the Nova rocket, capable of lifting 15 metric tons to low-Earth orbit in a fully reusable configuration, said Stoke co-founder and Chief Executive Andy Lapsa.

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It seems as though $5.6 billion wasn't enough. That was the news from the US Space Force on Friday, when military officials announced they were tripling the maximum value of one of the service's National Security Space Launch contracts to $17 billion.

The expansion of the Space Force's National Security Space Launch (NSSL) Phase 3 contract comes as the Pentagon signals rising demand for military satellite launches. The NSSL program is set up to allow Space Systems Command, which oversees the Space Force's launch program, to select from a pool of launch providers for individual missions to deliver the military's satellites to orbit.

The NSSL program has two parts. Lane 1 covers the Space Force's more risk-tolerant missions, such as medium-lift launches with experimental payloads or rideshare missions carrying satellites for the Pentagon's surveillance or data relay constellations. Lane 2 includes higher-priority strategic missions, like the government's largest and most expensive spy satellites, or radiation-hardened communications satellites designed to survive a nuclear war.

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