Uploaded January 2026 | Updated September 2026, 1 week ago
When Musk first came up with the idea of Starship, almost everyone laughed at it. The reaction wasn’t subtle. Engineers, commentators, and even people inside the aerospace industry openly mocked the idea, saying that no rocket that large could ever lift off Earth. And honestly, you can’t fully blame them for being skeptical. Before Starship, the largest rocket humanity had ever successfully flown was Saturn V, and even that monster already felt like it was pushing the absolute limits of physics and engineering.
Saturn 5 stood about 110 meters tall and produced roughly 34 million newtons of thrust at liftoff. Starship, by comparison, is about 120 meters tall when stacked with its Super Heavy booster and generates around 74 million newtons of thrust. That is more than double the thrust of Saturn 5. In simple terms, SpaceX wasn’t just trying to beat the biggest rocket in history. They were trying to completely redefine what “big” even means in rocketry. For decades, rockets grew slowly and cautiously. Starship jumped the curve all at once.
On top of that, Starship wasn’t just supposed to be big. It was supposed to be fully reusable. Not partially reusable like Falcon 9, where the booster comes back but the upper stage burns up. Starship’s design called for both the Super Heavy booster and the Starship upper stage to survive reentry and land vertically, ready to fly again. That idea alone sounded insane to many people. A fully reusable launch system capable of lifting over 100 metric tons to low Earth orbit had never even been close to reality.
When Musk first came up with the idea of Starship, almost everyone laughed at it. The reaction wasn’t subtle. Engineers, commentators, and even people inside the aerospace industry openly mocked the idea, saying that no rocket that large could ever lift off Earth. And honestly, you can’t fully blame them for being skeptical. Before Starship, the largest rocket humanity had ever successfully flown was Saturn V, and even that monster already felt like it was pushing the absolute limits of physics and engineering.
Saturn 5 stood about 110 meters tall and produced roughly 34 million newtons of thrust at liftoff. Starship, by comparison, is about 120 meters tall when stacked with its Super Heavy booster and generates around 74 million newtons of thrust. That is more than double the thrust of Saturn 5. In simple terms, SpaceX wasn’t just trying to beat the biggest rocket in history. They were trying to completely redefine what “big” even means in rocketry. For decades, rockets grew slowly and cautiously. Starship jumped the curve all at once.
On top of that, Starship wasn’t just supposed to be big. It was supposed to be fully reusable. Not partially reusable like Falcon 9, where the booster comes back but the upper stage burns up. Starship’s design called for both the Super Heavy booster and the Starship upper stage to survive reentry and land vertically, ready to fly again. That idea alone sounded insane to many people. A fully reusable launch system capable of lifting over 100 metric tons to low Earth orbit had never even been close to reality.
