Of course, there's a long history of stupidly amazing rockets that haven't advanced far beyond tech demos: Sprint pushing a mere 100Gs, and this horrifying abomination for example.
Why, you might be wondering, do all rockets put the flamey bits at the bottom? Surely that makes it hard to balance! If you look online, you'll immediately learn that this is a 'fallacy' but rarely is it explained as nicely as this Wired article about Iron Man.