The Starship’s 33 engines pump out 74,400 kilonewtons of force on liftoff, nearly twice as powerful as the Saturn V engine that sent humans to the moon. However, the entire vehicle is designed so that it can be caught like a dropped pencil and then flown again the next day.

At the moment of liftoff, the SpaceX spacecraft is propelled away from the launch pad with a thrust force of about 74.4 million newtons, which is enough force in principle to lift approximately 7,500 tons of mass directly against gravity.

To be clear, this is equivalent to twice the thrust of the Saturn V rocket that carried the Apollo astronauts to the Moon between 1969 and 1972. The vehicle itself is longer – 121 meters compared to the Saturn V rocket’s 111 – and heavier when fully fueled, with a total takeoff mass exceeding 5,000 tons.

In raw physical production, Starship is the most powerful rocket ever built.

But raw propulsion is not actually the goal of the spacecraft. Saturn V hit similar physical parameters half a century ago. What Starship is actually trying to prove — and what its engineering choices really reflect — is not the maximum size of the rocket. This is the maximum time between launches. If successful, this is an innovation that will change what humans can do in space.

What actually happens when you take off

The Super Heavy booster — the Starship’s massive first stage — is powered by 33 Raptor 2 engines burning liquid methane and liquid oxygen.

Each Raptor 2 produces approximately 2,260 kilonewtons of thrust at sea level, or about 230 tons of force. Multiplying 33 engines, the total is about 74.4 million newtons, or 16.7 million pound-force. This is more than the current maximum of NASA’s Space Launch System (about 39,144 kilonewtons) and more than twice the power of the Saturn V (about 35,000 kilonewtons).

The rocket burns fuel at an unusual rate. Super Heavy contains 3,400 tons of liquid methane and liquid oxygen. All 33 engines burn continuously for about 166 seconds during the first phase of ascent, consuming about 20 tons of propellant per second at peak flow.

At that point, the second stage — the Starship itself — separates and continues to orbit under its six Raptor engines while the Super Heavy booster reverses course and returns to the launch site.

This return is where the defining engineering revolution actually lives.

Why Saturn V comparisons only get you halfway

The Saturn V was, by all accounts, an exceptional rocket. It was launched 13 times between 1967 and 1973. Each of these launches ended with the entire rocket falling into the ocean, disintegrating, or burning up. Not a single Saturn V aircraft was recovered, refurbished, or flown again.

Every subsequent large missile, until about 2015, followed the same pattern. Rockets were manufactured, launched once, and then discarded. A typical expendable launch costs hundreds of millions of dollars for a single flight, with all of these expenses written off the moment the rocket leaves the pad.

SpaceX’s previous Falcon 9 rocket began to change this pattern in 2015 by recovering and reusing its first stage, landing it hard on a barge or landing pad, and then refurbishing it for subsequent flights. The first stages of the Falcon 9 rocket have now been fired up to 20 times each, significantly reducing the actual cost per launch.

Spacecraft pushes the logic of reuse even further. Both stages — the Super Heavy booster and the Starship spacecraft — are designed to return to Earth and be reused. The specific mechanism by which the booster returns is one of the strangest engineering choices in modern spaceflight.

Fishing chopsticks

Instead of landing on legs, the Super Heavy rocket returns to the launch site and is suspended in the air by two massive mechanical arms mounted on the launch tower. The weapons are officially called “Mechazilla”. Everyone calls them chopsticks.

The specific reason for selection is engineering economy. The landing legs add weight to the booster. Weight is subtracted from the load capacity. A tower-captured booster does not need to carry its own landing gear, meaning every kilogram of the tower-capture mechanism is one less kilogram than the booster has to lift on each flight for the rest of its service life.

The catch itself is accurate. The booster returns from space at supersonic speeds, decelerates using its own engines during the descent burn, and hovers briefly near the tower before the arms close around it and grab specific hard spots on the vehicle’s exterior. The entire approach and capture usually takes less than a minute.

SpaceX has succeeded for the first time in detecting the return of Super Heavy October 13, 2024, during IFT-5 flight testing. The second successful hunt took place on March 6, 2025 during IFT-8. The third goal has since been achieved. This technique is not yet routine, but it has been proven successful.

Why “fly back the next day” is the actual point

The specific reason all of this is important isn’t because picking up rockets is cool. It even makes missiles economically comparable to aircraft.

The plane costs a lot of money to build, but it flies thousands of times during its service life. This is what makes air travel affordable. Historically, a rocket costs the same as an airplane per unit, but it flies exactly once. That’s why sending anything into orbit has always been very expensive.

If the spacecraft could be captured, refitted, and flown again in a matter of days rather than months, the cost per flight would decrease by an order of magnitude. SpaceX Stated design intent It is a full stack turnaround measured over a period of hours to a few days, with the same booster potentially flying several times a week at full operational cadence.

It is really uncertain whether SpaceX will actually achieve this goal. The technology hasn’t proven that yet. As of the last test flight in May 2026, the individual boosters have not been re-launched from the catch. The company continues to work on the specific engineering issues – thermal fatigue, structural fatigue, and hardware regeneration – that separate a captured booster from a relaunched booster.

But the framework is now in place. A rocket was built that could produce twice the thrust of the Saturn V and could be caught back in the launch tower like an oversized bird returning to its perch. Whether the same rocket will be launched again within 24 hours is the question over the next few years of spacecraft development.

If the answer turns out to be yes, the economics of everything else in spaceflight will change. Sending humans to Mars, refueling spacecraft in orbit, building lunar bases—all of this is made possible in ways that expendable rockets could never support.

The 74 million Newtons of thrust is the specific engineering credential that makes the spacecraft serious. The pick-up-and-fly system is what makes it revolutionary. What remains to be proven is whether the tower is able to pick up what it grabs, and then let go again, quickly enough to actually matter.