This Is the Most Powerful Rocket Ever Built

Standing taller than a 40-story building, Starship is the biggest and most powerful rocket humanity has ever built.

Fully stacked, it rises about 124 meters into the air. At liftoff, 33 engines ignite together, producing more than twice the thrust of the Saturn V that carried astronauts to the Moon.

That much power is hard to comprehend. Starship is designed to haul around 100 tonnes of cargo to orbit in a single launch, and unlike every giant rocket before it, both the booster and the ship are built to be fully reusable, flying again and again. It is the vehicle SpaceX believes could one day carry people to the Moon and even to Mars, launching not once a year, but by the dozen.

Nothing this large has ever left the ground. When all 33 engines light at once, they unleash enough raw energy to rattle the ground for miles around. This is, by far, the most powerful machine human beings have ever flown.

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