How big is the world's largest rocket?

The Starship system consists of two stacked stages: the Super Heavy booster, about 71 m tall, and the Starship spacecraft, about 50 m tall. Together they exceed 120 m, taller than the Statue of Liberty with its pedestal. The 9 m diameter is the same for both stages, and the fully fueled stack weighs around 5,000 t on the pad.

Super Heavy carries 33 Raptor engines, which burn liquid methane and oxygen. The upper spacecraft carries another six: three optimized for sea level and three for vacuum. At liftoff, the booster's combined thrust is around 74 MN, compared with 34.5 MN from the Saturn V's five F-1 engines.

No other operational rocket exceeds Starship in height or thrust. The Saturn V stood 110.6 m tall, and NASA's SLS in its Block 1 configuration reaches 98 m. The Soviet N1, which never reached orbit, stood 105 m tall and produced about 45 MN.

In terms of payload capacity, SpaceX claims between 100 and 150 t to low Earth orbit in fully reusable mode, a figure that still needs to be proven in flight with an actual payload. The Saturn V, by contrast, did place about 140 t in low Earth orbit, including its third stage with the propellant for the lunar injection.

Since the first integrated flight on April 20, 2023, SpaceX has launched more than a dozen prototypes from Starbase, Texas. The program alternates partial successes with vehicle losses, something accepted in an iterative development approach where each unit is considered a test (as of May 2026). The most cited milestone is the capture of the Super Heavy booster by the launch tower's arms, achieved for the first time in October 2024.