rockets

A Starship Super Heavy booster pushes with roughly 74 meganewtons, a force equal to the weight of about 7,500 tonnes. Three Gorges Dam can generate 22,500 megawatts. The LHC stores 362 megajoules in a single proton beam. Each is a record, and none of them is measuring the same thing. This article sorts the contenders by thrust, power, stored energy, and mass moved, shows the arithmetic that links them, and corrects a few popular comparisons that do not survive the numbers.

SpaceX Starship is the largest rocket ever built — 121m tall, fully reusable, designed for Mars. How Raptor engines, orbital refueling, and Flight 13 work.

SpaceX figured out how to land rockets upright and fly them again. It's not magic — it's physics, software, and sheer persistence.

Orbit demands about 7.8 km/s of sideways speed, the Moon is 384,000 km away, and Mars is at least 55 million km. Here is the physics of getting to space, the history of exploration, and where Artemis, Starship, and Mars stand as of October 2026.

Getting to orbit once meant spending hundreds of millions of dollars to throw away a rocket. Reusable boosters changed the arithmetic, and the next generation of vehicles is trying to change it again.

From Newton's third law to the Tsiolkovsky rocket equation, this is what actually happens inside a rocket engine, how engine cycles differ, and why efficiency and thrust pull in opposite directions.