Disaster! China's Insane Attempt to Outsmart SpaceX with 185-meter Starship. Musk Laughs...

Disaster! China's Insane Attempt to Outsmart SpaceX with 185-meter Starship. Musk Laughs...
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Disaster! China's Insane Attempt to Outsmart SpaceX with 185-meter Starship. Musk Laughs...
Starship is a giant. Just the space inside it for cargo is as big as every pressurized module of the ISS combined. But what if I told you China is building a copy of Starship — with a cargo hold three times that size?
Three times. To engineers, even ones at NASA, that sounds almost impossible. And yet China put the numbers out there like a challenge thrown right at SpaceX: we'll copy you, and we'll do it better.
So can China really build a rocket larger than Starship? And can something that big even survive the laws of physics?
Let's find out.
Disaster! China's Insane Attempt to Outsmart SpaceX with 185-meter Starship. Musk Laughs...
The story starts in 2011, when China first drew up the Long March 9. And that first version? Honestly, it looked like a Saturn 5 with a Chinese flag on it. Huge, three stages, fly once and dump it in the ocean. A machine straight out of the 1960s.
Then Starship showed up, and it turned the entire space world upside down. And China started paying very close attention.
So they quietly tore up their blueprint and started over. A few years later, they tore it up again. And here's the strange part: every single time they redrew it, the Long March 9 looked a little more like Starship. By late 2024, when the newest version was rolled out at the Zhuhai Airshow, Western journalists took one look and had a single word for it. Clone. Two stages, fully reusable, thirty methane engines — basically a Starship with a Chinese flag on it.
Now, they say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. But in the rocket business, it's more than flattery. When your biggest rival throws out ten years of engineering to walk down your path instead, that's not admiration. That's an admission. An admission that SpaceX was right.
But hold on. If this were just a copycat story, this video wouldn't exist. Because the newest design — the one that leaked back in June — shows China doesn't just want to copy Starship anymore. They want to build something bigger. A lot bigger. But bigger... how much bigger exactly?
Disaster! China's Insane Attempt to Outsmart SpaceX with 185-meter Starship. Musk Laughs...
To answer that, let's put these two giants side by side. Starship today stands about 124 meters tall and weighs over 5,000 tons on the launch pad. Those numbers alone make it the largest, most powerful flying machine humans have ever built. Taller than Big Ben. In all of history, nothing that flies has ever beaten it. Not once.
Until that June paperwork showed up. Early in June, the government of Hainan province quietly posted a batch of construction documents online. Boring, right? Building permits. But the space community dug through every line — and struck gold. Because it was the paperwork for the Long March 9 factory. And the size of a factory tells you the size of whatever's getting built inside it. You haven't seen the monster yet, but you can look at the cage they're building and figure out how big it's going to be.
And what those documents hinted at made people rub their eyes. The future Long March 9 could be a three-stage rocket standing between 165 and 185 meters tall.
Sit with that number for a second. 185 meters. Starship at 121 is already a world record — and this thing blows right past it. The Statue of Liberty, pedestal included, is about 93 meters. Which means this version of the Long March 9 is nearly as tall as two Statues of Liberty stacked on top of each other. It's not really a rocket anymore. It's a Manhattan skyscraper that decided to rip itself out of the ground and fly.

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