SpaceX Starship: The Continued Evolution of the Big Falcon Rocket - NASASpaceflight.com

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Pushing it off the pad will be 28 Raptor engines producing more thrust than an astounding 50 A380s (75,315 kN/16,931,500 lbf).  The Starship upper stage alone will mass 11/12th of a Falcon Heavy, and its reusable cargo variant’s 150 tonne payload would take five reusable Falcon Heavy launches to equal.  Its cargo bay is large enough to swallow a passenger locomotive or a tunnel boring machine

In 2006, while attempting to launch its 28 tonne Falcon 1 rocket, four year old SpaceX was given seed money by NASA to build a much larger ten-engined rocket – nine engines on the first stage and one on the second stage – called the Falcon 9, canceling plans for the smaller Falcon 5 rocket

Before the decision was made to go ahead with the Falcon 9 though, Musk made plans to eventually build something called the BFR, or “Big Falcon Rocket,” which at that time was planned to have the biggest engine in history according to Musk biographer Ashlee Vance.  It’s worth remembering that at the time SpaceX’s then-failing Falcon 1 rocket massed less than 1/100th the size of the Saturn V Moon rocket

On June 18, 2009, the first public mention of the Raptor rocket engine was made by SpaceX’s Max Vozoff at the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) Innovations in Orbit: An Exploration of Commercial Crew and Cargo Transportation event.  However, it was not connected to the BFR at this time, being envisioned as a hydrogen-oxygen upper stage engine for the Falcon 9

Multiple Raptor engines were to power a future rocket called the Mars Colonial Transporter capable of lifting 150-200 tonnes to LEO

NSF’s early work showed that a single 9.8 meter core version of this rocket was only capable of lifting 120 tonnes, less than the 150-200 tonnes SpaceX claimed.  A triple-core version massing 5,440 tonnes and powered by 28 Raptor engines would have been capable of lifting more than 286 tonnes to LEO.  The single-core and triple cores would have been able to launch the equivalent of a fully-loaded Boeing 757-200 and McDonnell Douglas MD-11ER, respectively