What is SpaceX’s spaceship? It really is a Martian ship.

For Elon Musk, Starship is really a Martian ship. He envisions a fleet of spaceships that will carry colonists to the red planet in the coming years.

And for that ultimate goal, Starship, under development by Musk’s SpaceX rocket company, needs to be big. Stacked atop what SpaceX calls a Super Heavy booster, the Starship rocket system will be, by almost every measure, the largest and most powerful yet.

It is the tallest rocket ever built: 120 meters high, or about 30 meters taller than the Statue of Liberty including the pedestal.

And it has the most engines ever in a rocket booster: the Super Heavy has 33 of SpaceX’s powerful Raptor engines protruding from the bottom. As these engines lift Starship off the launch pad in South Texas, they will generate 16 million pounds of thrust at full throttle.

NASA’s new Space Launch System rocket, which made its maiden flight in November 2022, holds the current record for maximum thrust of a rocket: 8.8 million pounds. The maximum thrust of the Saturn V rocket that carried NASA astronauts to the moon during the Apollo program was relatively paltry: 7.6 million pounds.

An even more transformative feature of Starship is that it is designed to be completely reusable. The Super Heavy booster will land much like those for SpaceX’s smaller Falcon 9 rockets, and Starship will be able to return from space while flopping through the atmosphere like a sky diver before turning to a vertical position for landing.

That means all the really expensive parts – like the 33 Raptor engines in the Super Heavy booster and six additional Raptors in Starship itself – will be used over and over again instead of being thrown into the ocean after one flight.

That has the potential to lower the cost of putting payloads into orbit — to less than $10 million to launch 100 tons into space, Mr. Musk has predicted.

Starship and Super Heavy are shiny because SpaceX made them from stainless steel, which is cheaper than using other materials like carbon composites. But one side of Starship is covered in black tiles to protect the spacecraft from the extreme heat it will encounter if it gets far enough during its flight to reenter the atmosphere.