What is the greatest rocket ever built?

Height, thrust and payload are easy to line up. Reliability, reusability and what a machine was actually built for are not.

1. 1
   Saturn V

   Stood 111 metres tall, made 7.5 million pounds of thrust at liftoff and flew thirteen times without losing a crew or payload.
   1000pts
2. 2
   Space Shuttle

   The first reusable crewed spacecraft, which flew 135 missions and built the International Space Station.
   649pts
3. 3
   Ariane 5

   Europe's workhorse for 27 years, which placed the James Webb Space Telescope on a flawless trajectory.
   579pts
4. 4
   Soyuz

   First flown in 1966 and still carrying crews, the longest-serving launch vehicle ever built.
   463pts
5. 5
   Space Launch System

   NASA's Artemis rocket, which sent four astronauts around the Moon in April 2026.
   463pts
6. 6
   Redstone

   Launched Alan Shepard and Gus Grissom on America's first suborbital crewed flights in 1961.
   463pts
7. 7
   Delta IV Heavy

   For a decade the most powerful American rocket in service, and the one that flew Parker Solar Probe.
   392pts
8. 8
   Falcon 9

   The first orbital-class rocket with a reusable first stage, now the most-flown launch vehicle in history.
   392pts
9. 9
   Long March 5

   China's heavy-lift rocket, which launched the Tianwen-1 Mars mission and the Tiangong station modules.
   309pts
10. 10
    Starship

    SpaceX's fully reusable super-heavy vehicle, the largest and most powerful rocket ever flown.
    309pts
11. 11
    Atlas V

    Flew more than a hundred missions with near-perfect reliability, launching Curiosity, Juno and New Horizons.
    309pts
12. 12
    Titan II

    An intercontinental missile converted to launch all ten crewed Gemini flights.
    309pts
13. 13
    N1

    The Soviet Moon rocket that failed on all four launch attempts and was cancelled in secret.
    309pts
14. 14
    V-2

    The first object to reach space, and the German weapon whose engineers built both superpowers' early rockets.
    93pts