The claim is a direct, fundamental physical principle governed by the Tsiolkovsky rocket equation, where maximum velocity change depends logarithmically on the wet-to-dry mass ratio and effective exhaust velocity. Because this is a universally accepted baseline fact in rocketry and everyday textbook physics, it falls under common knowledge and does not require specific paper citations. None of the provided retrieved papers deal with single-stage rocket delta-v limits anyway (they focus on electrochemistry, satellite constellations, hydrogen properties, imaging cameras, aircraft parameter estimation, planetary science, trajectory generation, vibration isolation, centrifugal pumps, particle detectors, magnetometers, and aluminum alloys).