What was the largest rocket ever made?

By every physical measure the biggest rocket ever assembled is Starship, the fully reusable two-stage vehicle SpaceX has been testing from Starbase in Texas since April 2023. The Super Heavy booster and the Starship upper stage together stand about 123 m tall, roughly the height of a 40-storey building, and the stack weighs close to 5,000 t when fully loaded with liquid methane and liquid oxygen. The 33 Raptor engines of the booster deliver about 74 MN (16.7 million lbf) at liftoff, more than twice the thrust of any rocket that flew in the twentieth century.

For more than fifty years the title belonged to the Saturn V, built for the Apollo programme by NASA with Boeing, North American and Douglas. It measured 110.6 m (363 ft), weighed about 2,970 t on the pad and produced 34.5 MN from five F-1 kerosene engines. It flew 13 times between 1967 and 1973 without losing a payload, carried about 140 t to low Earth orbit and sent nine crews to the Moon. Its Soviet rival, the N1, was slightly shorter at 105 m but had more thrust, around 45 MN; all four of its flights failed.

Starship has flown a series of test flights on deliberately suborbital trajectories, and as of May 2026 it had not yet delivered a customer payload to orbit. That is why many references still list the Saturn V as the largest operational rocket while acknowledging that Starship is larger. NASA's Space Launch System sits between them at 98 m and 39 MN, and it is the largest rocket currently certified to carry astronauts beyond low Earth orbit.