STARSHIP, SATURN V, AND THE SUPER-HEAVY ARMS RACE

‘umans have always attached more than hardware to big rockets.

- TDG NETWORK

SpaceX's Starship lights its engines during an integrated flight test on 13 October 2024. Later test flights in 2025 saw the rocket splash down intact, underscoring rapid progress toward reusability.

In the 1960s, the Saturn V enabled the United States to set foot on another world. Standing taller than the Statue of Liberty, it could haul about 140 t to low-Earth orbit (LEO) and sling roughly 43 t toward the Moon. That raw lifting power bought Washington soft power; every Saturn V launch was a television event broadcast in Cold War colour. By the mid-1980s, the Soviet Energia had promised its own super heavy future. Using strap-on boosters and a methane-fueled core, it lifted around 100 t to orbit and launched the Buran shuttle once. Then the USSR fell. Without a functioning economy, the “Energia era” ended after two flights. These two examples bookend a simple truth: tonnage is policy. Countries that can loft football-field-sized payloads set rules. Those who can’t watch.

Super-heavy rockets are strategic because they let governments and companies deploy assets faster and in bigger chunks. A single Saturn V launched the entire Skylab space station. Energia was sized to build a Soviet Moon base. Decades later, the race is on again, but this time it looks more like an industrial marathon than a flag-planting sprint.