# 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.

*By YPB Team · Published August 23, 2026 · https://youpick.best/ranking/what-is-the-greatest-rocket-ever-built*

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## Current results (no votes yet)

1. **Saturn V** — score 1000/1000
   Stood 111 metres tall, made 7.5 million pounds of thrust at liftoff and flew thirteen times without losing a crew or payload.
2. **Space Shuttle** — score 649/1000
   The first reusable crewed spacecraft, which flew 135 missions and built the International Space Station.
3. **Ariane 5** — score 579/1000
   Europe's workhorse for 27 years, which placed the James Webb Space Telescope on a flawless trajectory.
4. **Soyuz** — score 463/1000
   First flown in 1966 and still carrying crews, the longest-serving launch vehicle ever built.
5. **Space Launch System** — score 463/1000
   NASA's Artemis rocket, which sent four astronauts around the Moon in April 2026.
6. **Redstone** — score 463/1000
   Launched Alan Shepard and Gus Grissom on America's first suborbital crewed flights in 1961.
7. **Delta IV Heavy** — score 392/1000
   For a decade the most powerful American rocket in service, and the one that flew Parker Solar Probe.
8. **Falcon 9** — score 392/1000
   The first orbital-class rocket with a reusable first stage, now the most-flown launch vehicle in history.
9. **Long March 5** — score 309/1000
   China's heavy-lift rocket, which launched the Tianwen-1 Mars mission and the Tiangong station modules.
10. **Starship** — score 309/1000
   SpaceX's fully reusable super-heavy vehicle, the largest and most powerful rocket ever flown.
11. **Atlas V** — score 309/1000
   Flew more than a hundred missions with near-perfect reliability, launching Curiosity, Juno and New Horizons.
12. **Titan II** — score 309/1000
   An intercontinental missile converted to launch all ten crewed Gemini flights.
13. **N1** — score 309/1000
   The Soviet Moon rocket that failed on all four launch attempts and was cancelled in secret.
14. **V-2** — score 93/1000
   The first object to reach space, and the German weapon whose engineers built both superpowers' early rockets.

Tags: space, nasa, engineering, rockets