Is SpaceX's Starship The Most Powerful Rocket Ever Built?

SpaceX's Starship is a special rocket in so many ways. First, standing at 408 feet, it's absolutely massive, and the tallest to ever fly. When it comes to height records, we have to go all the way back to the Saturn V rocket of the Apollo era half a century ago, which stood at 363 feet, to find its nearest competitor. But it's not just height where the Starship impresses — it's also power. The 33 Raptor 3 engines that blast the Starship's first-stage Super Heavy booster to space generate a combined launch thrust of 18.1 million pounds, making it the most powerful rocket ever built by a significant margin.

In fact, the Starship's colossal thrust figure is more than twice that of the Saturn V, which produced about 7.6 million pounds of thrust as it left the launchpad and ranks fourth on the list of most powerful rockets ever built. In third place is NASA's Space Launch System (SLS) rocket, which has flown twice to date — most recently in the Artemis II moon mission in April 2026 — generating 8.8 million pounds of thrust. Coming in second is the Soviet N-1, a rocket that achieved 10.2 million pounds of thrust during its four launches between 1969 and 1972, though its development was ended in 1974 after all of its flights failed to reach orbit.

To give the Starship's launch capability a little more context, the rocket's thrust power as it leaves the ground with all engines blazing is more than 10 times that of the spaceflight company's workhorse Falcon 9 rocket, which generates 1.7 million pounds of thrust during liftoff. But the Starship's huge size and awesome power are only part of what makes the vehicle so remarkable.

The Starship first launched in April 2023 and is still in the testing and development stage. SpaceX takes an iterative approach to rocket development, putting vehicles like the Falcon 9 and the Starship through real-world tests rather than relying heavily on ground testing in the way that NASA does. So when the first Starship exploded just four minutes after liftoff on its maiden flight, SpaceX considered it a valuable test rather than simply a failure. Since then, the Starship has flown a further 13 times, with each flight generally improving on the performance of the previous ones.

SpaceX has even managed to get the Super Heavy (the first-stage booster of the Starship launch system) to perform an autonomous descent back to the launchpad as part of its efforts to make it a fully reusable rocket. The company has already mastered the landing process with the Falcon 9, but at 236 feet, the Super Heavy is nearly twice as tall, making the maneuver all the more challenging. What's more, instead of landing it on the ground or a droneship as it does with the Falcon 9, SpaceX uses a pair of giant mechanical arms to "catch" the Super Heavy just meters above the ground when it returns to Earth, an astonishing feat never before attempted with any other rocket in history. So what are the plans for the Starship when it finally emerges from its testing phase?

SpaceX has grand ambitions for the Starship, with the company claiming it could one day carry as many as 100 people to deep space. In the near-term, though, the rocket is expected to transport cargo and much smaller crews to the moon, and ultimately could take the first humans all the way to Mars. It's also designed to carry more than 100 tons of payload to low-Earth orbit, with in-orbit refueling potentially enabling far larger amounts of cargo to be transported to deep space than today's rockets can manage. This capability would allow NASA to achieve its aim of building a permanent base on the moon where astronauts can spend extended periods living and working, similar to how they do on the International Space Station today. A lunar base could also become a stepping stone for Mars missions, as the moon's lower gravity would make launching from the lunar surface less fuel-intensive, potentially allowing for more cargo to be sent to Mars.

The immediate plan is to ready a modified version of the Starship's upper stage, known as the Ship, to land the first humans on the lunar surface since 1972. The highly anticipated Artemis IV mission is currently scheduled for 2028, and will use NASA's SLS rocket and Orion spacecraft to fly the astronauts to a lunar orbit before transferring to the Starship HLS lunar lander for the descent to the moon. It's an exciting time for space fans interested in human exploration of deep space, though there are still plenty of challenges to overcome before the Starship is ready for operational use.