Everyone knows that Starship is the largest rocket in the world, but it’s hard to get a sense of its scale without a familiar reference on the same plane. For obvious reasons, we don’t usually see people near the launch pad during flight broadcasts, but these photos help to better perceive its enormous size.
The current version of Starship measures 121.3 meters high: 71 of the Super Heavy booster and 50.3 of the Starship ship. For comparison, NASA’s SLS rocket measures 98 meters, SpaceX’s Falcon 9 measures 70 meters, and the European Space Agency’s Ariane 6 measures 62 meters. Starship 2, which will begin testing in early 2025, will stretch to 124.4 meters to accommodate larger tanks. Starship 3, the version with which Elon Musk intends to colonize Mars, will reach a hypothetical height of 150 meters.
The Starbase team versus Starship
Almost everything inside the nine-meter-diameter rocket is fuel and oxidizer. To lift its own weight and 100 tons of cargo into low-Earth orbit, Starship needs more than 5,000 tons of methane and liquid oxygen. Another very characteristic aspect of the rocket is the number of engines. The Super Heavy has 33 and the Starship has six, three optimized for the Earth’s atmosphere and another three for the vacuum of space, with the largest nozzle; although Musk has commented on several occasions that future versions of the rocket will have even more engines. The current version of the engine is called Raptor 2, but SpaceX already has the new Raptor 3 in tests.
Starship Flight 7 has just received the go-ahead from the Federal Aviation Administration and is expected in January or February 2025. Although it marks the debut of a second-generation spacecraft, with the serial number Starship 33, the Super Heavy booster It will continue to be the first. In this case, it is Booster 14, which just completed a test firing and, in a few days, you will have the new generation Ship 33 stacked on top.
As for the third generation Starship, also called Starship v3, Starship 3 or Starship Block 3, it is not expected for a few years, but it promises to be Noah’s Ark in the colonization of Mars. With nine engines in the second stage and a massive height of 150 meters, it is designed to offer a load capacity of more than 200 tons.
The interior of Starship
Starship’s cargo bay with a toy banana
Workers inside Starship
Raptor engines
The 33 Raptor engines of the Super Heavy rocket
The three generations of Raptor engines
Atmospheric and vacuum raptor
lunar starship
Starship spacecraft that will take NASA astronauts to the lunar surface
A mockup of Starship at NASA’s buoyancy laboratory in Houston
Starship docked with NASA’s Orion spacecraft
Starship Super Heavy
Starship rocket at launch tower
Detail of the hot separation ring and moving surfaces of Super Heavy
Images | SpaceX