The Poster That Took Me a Week

Our Stanford exhibit had all eleven rocket models sitting in one case, and I kept thinking people needed a way to actually compare them. Like, how is Starship different from SLS, besides the obvious? So I made a poster for it.

It's called "The Rockets Shaping the Next Era of Space Exploration," and it covers every rocket in the set: Vulcan Centaur, Angara A5V, Falcon Heavy, New Glenn, SLS, Starship, Long March 9, Yenisei, Ariane 6, Falcon 9, and Neutron.

What's on it

Each rocket gets its own column. You can see the engines on each stage, what propellant it burns, its propulsion cycle, thrust, payload, cost per kilogram, what missions it's meant for, and its flight history so far. I used publicly available data as of spring 2026, so some of it has probably changed already. Rockets move fast.

A weekend project that took a week

I thought this would take a weekend. It took a full week. A lot of that time was just checking numbers, because different sources don't always agree. The rest was getting eleven columns to line up so you could read straight across a row and compare two rockets without getting lost.

What I learned

I learned way more from making it than I expected. Before this, "propulsion cycle" was just a term I had heard. Now I actually get why a gas generator engine is simpler but less efficient, and why full-flow staged combustion is such a big deal for Starship. I also started noticing how much the choice of fuel (methane, kerosene, or hydrogen) ends up shaping the whole rocket.

Was it worth it?

Yes. I got so many nice comments about it from people at Stanford, and from people at the other exhibits where I've used it since. It also ended up playing a big role in my AI smart glasses study, since the whole question was whether AI glasses could add anything on top of a good poster.