Mass reduction and increased payload efficiency
The elimination of traditional landing legs from the Super Heavy booster significantly reduces weight, allowing for greater payload capacity, a crucial advantage given Starship’s ambitions for interplanetary missions.
For context, the removed landing legs would have added several tons to the vehicle, similar to the Falcon 9’s landing legs, constituting about 8% of its total mass. Without these, Starship, towering at 397 feet (121 meters), supports a more substantial payload, leveraging its capacity to the fullest.
The Starship system, including its Super Heavy booster, requires over 10 million pounds of fuel, consisting of liquid oxygen and methane, to thrust itself beyond Earth’s atmosphere.
This propellant capacity underscores the sheer power of the 33 next-generation Raptor engines that produce a combined thrust of 17 million pounds at launch, making it the world’s most powerful rocket by a considerable margin.