Starship — the largest rocket ever built

Starship is the fully reusable super-heavy launch system SpaceX is building to carry cargo and people to the Moon and Mars. Standing about 120 metres tall with 33 Raptor engines on its Super Heavy booster, it produces roughly twice the liftoff thrust of the Saturn V — making it the largest and most powerful rocket ever flown.

SpaceX develops it through an explicit "hardware-rich," iterative approach: build fast, fly, learn from failures, and fly again. The first integrated test launched in April 2023; subsequent flights progressively demonstrated engine performance, staging, re-entry and recovery. Each "failure" is a deliberately accepted experiment that buys data far faster than years of ground analysis.

NASA is betting on it: a lunar-optimized Starship is the chosen Human Landing System for returning astronauts to the Moon under Artemis. No vehicle in history has aimed so high — and few programs have advanced so quickly from a clean sheet to flying full-scale hardware.