How tall is Starship?

The stack consists of the Super Heavy booster, about 71 m tall, and the Starship upper stage itself, 50 m in version 1 and 52 m in version 2. Both share a 9 m (30 ft) diameter and a stainless-steel structure, giving the vehicle its uniform silhouette, without the usual stepped-down stages seen on other rockets. The ship includes the nose cone, the payload bay, the tanks and six Raptor engines; the booster carries 33 Raptors and the four grid fins it uses to return to the launch tower.

At 121-123 m, Starship surpasses the Saturn V (110.6 m), the Soviet N1 (105 m) and NASA's SLS in its Block 1 version (98 m). For perspective, the Statue of Liberty stands 93 m with its pedestal, and a Boeing 747-8 is 76 m long. Its liftoff mass, about 5,000 t, is nearly double the Saturn V's 2,970 t, and its liftoff thrust, around 74 MN in version 1, is twice the 34 MN of the 1960s moon rocket. It is by far the largest and most powerful vehicle to have reached space.

SpaceX has announced a version 3 with lengthened tanks and Raptor 3 engines, which will raise the total height to about 124 m and thrust to nearly 100 MN. The payload bay, with a usable diameter of 8 m, is designed for 100 to 150 t to low Earth orbit in a recoverable configuration. SpaceX builds the vehicles at Starbase, Texas, next to the launch pad. Those figures are design targets: the test flights conducted so far have carried only mass simulators or Starlink satellite mock-ups.