[oconnor663]

The vehicle is designed to hold all that fuel, plus whatever payload it carries on top, but it's not designed to have heavy loads attached to it in any other way. Rockets are so intensely optimized for weight that sometimes they're barely strong enough to stand upright if you fuel them the wrong way: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=imkdz63agHY.

[arjie]

That's a great video! Thank you for sharing it. A rocket is more like a soda can than a building but it's hard to relate when you see such a massive object!

[oconnor663]

You can see a similar effect after the explosion at the end of last week's Starship test flight. If you look at where the flames are coming out after the first fireball clears, it kind of pancakes under its own weight there: https://www.youtube.com/live/Zi2SU98BAD8?t=5735s

[arjie]

Oh huh. You really can. I didn't pick up on that the first few hundred times I watched it. That's really cool. It kind of splats down into a 2-d rectangle.

[AceyMan]

It's been said that the most amazing engineering of the whole Shuttle program was the external fuel tank (and there is one with the static display of Endeavour here at the California Science Center in LA).