What is the biggest rocket ever made?

Starship is a two-stage vehicle: the Super Heavy booster, about 71 m long, and the Starship upper stage, around 50 m. Stacked, it exceeds 120 m, taller than the 110.6 m Saturn V and the Statue of Liberty with its pedestal. Its 33 Raptor engines burn liquid methane and liquid oxygen and deliver about 74 MN at liftoff, compared with roughly 34 MN for the five F-1 engines of the Saturn V. The fully fuelled stack weighs close to 5,000 tonnes, and SpaceX's stated goal is more than 100 tonnes of payload to low Earth orbit in fully reusable configuration.

Before Starship, the largest rocket to reach orbit was the Saturn V, which flew thirteen times between 1967 and 1973 and lofted about 118 tonnes to low Earth orbit. The Soviet N1 was slightly shorter at 105 m but heavier at ignition, about 2,750 tonnes, and its 30 engines produced some 45 MN; all four launches failed between 1969 and 1972. The Soviet Energia of 1987–1988 and the Space Shuttle stack were the next in size, each producing over 30 MN at liftoff. NASA's Space Launch System, flown on Artemis I in 2022, produces about 39 MN and is the most powerful rocket in operation apart from Starship.

Size is not an end in itself. Starship is designed to be fully and rapidly reusable, and reusability favours large vehicles: the fixed cost of recovery and refurbishment is spread over a bigger payload, and the mass penalty of heat shields, flaps and landing propellant is easier to absorb. SpaceX intends the vehicle for Starlink deployment, NASA's Artemis lunar landings under the Human Landing System contract, and eventually crewed flights to Mars, all of which need far more mass per launch than existing rockets provide.