Starship Is the Largest, Most Powerful Rocket Ever Built

For over 50 years, the record for most powerful rocket ever flown belonged to NASA’s Saturn V, the towering machine that launched Apollo astronauts to the Moon. In 2023, that record fell.

SpaceX’s Starship — the fully stacked combination of the Super Heavy booster and the Starship upper stage — stands about 121 metres tall, taller than the Statue of Liberty including its pedestal. At liftoff, its 33 Raptor engines together produce roughly 74 meganewtons of thrust, close to double what the Saturn V generated.

A few things make Starship’s design unusual among rockets:

• It’s built from stainless steel rather than the exotic lightweight alloys most rockets use — steel is cheaper, easier to weld, and handles the extreme heat of reentry surprisingly well
• Both stages are designed to be fully reusable — not just the booster (as with Falcon 9), but the upper stage too, meant to land back on Earth (or eventually on the Moon or Mars) and fly again
• It’s designed to carry over 100 tonnes to low Earth orbit, and even more if refueled in orbit by other Starship flights — a concept with no precedent in spaceflight history

That last idea, orbital refueling, is central to why Starship exists: NASA has selected a version of it as the lunar lander for the Artemis program, intending to use in-orbit refueling to give it enough fuel to descend to the Moon’s surface and return astronauts to lunar orbit — the first crewed Moon landing since Apollo 17 in 1972.

Whether Starship fully lives up to its ambitions is still being proven flight by flight. But by sheer size and thrust, the record for humanity’s most powerful machine now belongs to a rocket built from steel, in a Texas boatyard turned launch site.