What is the name of the world's biggest rocket?

Since its first integrated flight in April 2023, the pairing of the Super Heavy booster and the Starship spacecraft has been the tallest, heaviest and most powerful launcher ever flown. The current version stands about 123 m tall and its 33 Raptor engines on the first stage produce over 70 MN of thrust at liftoff, nearly double that of a Saturn V. Both stages are designed to be recovered and reused; the booster has already been caught by the arms of the Texas launch tower on several flights, and SpaceX is preparing longer versions with upgraded Raptor engines (as of September 2026).

For more than fifty years the record belonged to the Saturn V, the Moon rocket of the Apollo program: 110.6 m tall, around 2,900 t on the pad and 34 MN of thrust from its first stage. Its Soviet rival, the N1, was somewhat shorter (105 m) but exceeded it in thrust; its four flights between 1969 and 1972 all failed. The Soviet Energia and the US Space Shuttle both exceeded 2,000 t in mass, though with less height. Today, NASA's Space Launch System, at 98 m in its Block 1 version and 39 MN of thrust, is the second most powerful in service.

The measure needs clarifying. In terms of height, Starship wins clearly; in terms of liftoff mass or thrust, it wins too. But in payload capacity the order depends on the configuration: Starship is designed to carry more than 100 t to low Earth orbit reusably, while the Saturn V placed around 140 t in expendable mode. Physical size, in any case, is not an end in itself: it responds to the goal of lowering cost per kilogram through full reusability.