In 2018 I was doing an international commute, and wanted something I could work on effectively while travelling. Eurostar is pretty comfortable, (particularly in standard premium), and the new laptop was seriously powerful, but I’ve never found it easy to work with a touch pad, and there wasn’t enough space for a mouse.
So I came up with the idea of tidying up the various real spacecraft I have worked on, and assembling sets of images rendered perspective free, to a standard scale, which would make it easy to clearly show the different sizes of the various spacecraft.
This soon became the Rocket Library project!
(Click for a larger version.)
It soon became clear that this was going to be handy to split into different sets of rockets as well, like this:
Here a set of the larger ones. Or how about a set of three spaceplanes?
I also found it fun to add some fictional spacecraft into the mix, such as the Discovery from 2001.
Or how about gathering the various British rockets together?
Again the reminder, click the pictures for larger versions!
At the time of writing, this is the biggest set in one image…
You might like to see how many you can identify! Some are rather obscure…
Don’t scroll down if you don’t want to see the answers.
Full list of rockets in the big set…
Keep scrolling…
Keep scrolling…
The list!
- Skylark
- Black Knight
- Black Arrow
- V2
- Canadian Arrow
- SpaceX Falcon 1
- Goddard-L16
- Blue Streak
- Scout
- India’s SLV-3
- Mercury / Redstone
- Vega
- Europa
- Sputnik 1 R7
- Delta II
- Ariane 1
- Angara A5
- Energia M
- Soyuz
- Proton
- Zenit-2
- Buran / Energia
- US Space Shuttle
- Saturn 1B
- Soviet N-11 (Unbuilt)
- SpaceX Falcon 9
- Saturn V
- Soviet N-1
- Soviet UR-700 (Unbuilt)
- Soviet Vulkan (Energia based, Unbuilt)
Hi, Nick. Nice work here – always interesting to see these size comparisons, especially for some of the more obscure rockets.
One comment though on your “British rockets versus a Routemaster” image – I wonder if there has been a bit of an Imperial vs Metric problem 🙂
That is, the Black Arrow looks very small to me for a rocket that successfully orbited a satellite. Indeed, doing a bit of Wiki-searching, I see that the Black Arrow was 13 metres high, while the Blue Streak was 18.75 metres, Black Knight 10.2–11.6 metres, and Skylark 7.6–12.8 metres. These all seem pretty much in proportion.
But the Routemaster seems way too big. Indeed, it’s height was just 4.38 metres, so much smaller than any of the rockets. In Imperial units though, it was 14 feet 4.5 inches, and if you took that to be its height in metres then yes, it would be just a bit bigger than the Black Arrow 😉
Anyway, again, nice work.
best,
Mark McCaughrean
European Space Agency
Thanks Mark – you may well be right. I’ve actually started a spreadsheet to track and check all my rocket’s dimensions, and that they are lit consistently.
Also working on scale modelling, but in LEGO 🙂
https://i.imgur.com/I8hDeLe.jpg
A member of the community is currentyl modelling N1 in LEGO, do you have any original source of the fairing separtion on your N1 Blok B and C model? It is the first time i saw that for that model
Cheers
Hi Nick
Just came across your site whilst researching an article about UK rockets… I just wanted to suggest that the picture of UK rockets compared to a London bus is WAY off scale 🙂
I’ve stood next to at least three of those rockets and, for example, the Skylark without a Chick booster under it, is about 25ft tall. A Routemaster bus is only 14ft. Black Arrow is 43ft tall, nearly double the Skylark and three and a half times the height of the bus.
Why are they shown at between 50% and 25% scale compared to the bus?
Anyway, interested to see that fixed if you get a chance 🙂
Cheers!!
I’m currently redo pretty much all my rockets and scale comparison objects, thanks for pointing that out.
Absolutely amazing!
GREAT LOVE OF ROCKETRY!!!!
It’s Good to see You & so many Americans supporting the new space race, if not for public opinion and commercial sectors, the program would wither, and china would take the high ground and their track record is rather scary.
only in the free west, can you have the freedom to post whatever you desire
God Bless ya and keep the faith in mankind’s peaceful exploration of our cosmos
thanks for all your photos, CG, and data on rockets of the world
awesome work!