Abilene Building vs SpaceX Starship Size

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This image if of a test fire of 3 of the 30 Raptor engines that will carry the Space X SuperHeavy into orbit. This is just the booster. That’s the part that carries the Starship part to orbit and then returns and lands on Earth to be reused. The combination of these two craft is will take the next humans to the moon.

What this picture doesn’t give you is an idea of just how tall this thing is. I could tell you that the booster shown is 130 meters tall, but I’d lose most of us Americans right away. If I said, 230ft, you’d start getting it. But in this post I wanted to give some perspective on that height.

I live in Abilene, Texas, a small city in West Texas. These are the four tallest buildings in town.

#BUILDINGFLOORSHEIGHT
1Enterprise Tower20285 ft
2Hotel Wooten18200 ft
3First Financial Center10145 ft
4The Windsor10139 ft
Tallest Buildings In Abilene

What this means is that if the Super Heavy Booster were sitting in Downtown Abilene, it would be the second tallest building.

If you’ve been following SpaceX’s recent test launches in south Texas, you may have seen this being shot up to the edge of space and landed again:

Starship Test

This is Starship. It’s what will carry people, and it is no small thing. It is 50 meter, or 160ft all by itself. Which means all by itself, it would be the 3rd tallest building in Abilene. It is taller than the First Financial Building and the Winsor downtown.

And while it can take itself to orbit and back, that won’t get it to the moon. So the Super Heavy Booster was created to carry it. Starship will be stacked onto the top of the Super Heavy giving a total height of 130 meters or 390 ft. Making it much taller than the Enterprise Building.

According to Google, a building story is about 14ft on average. Which makes Starship 11 stories. Super Heavy 16 stories, and together almost 30 stories tall.

Just wanted to give some perspective to my Abilene friends.

#StructureHeight (ft)Floors
1Super Heavy & Starship39030
2Enterprise Building28520
3Falcon 9 with Fairing229.6
4Hotel Wooten20018
5Starship16011
6First Financial Center14510
7The Windsor13910