That's the famous rocket equation (and with rockets, none of the solutions other replies mention, like depots or pipelines, are available). There's a thought experiment that for a planet only a bit heavier than Earth (something like 2x or 5x) it might be completely impractical to launch anything into orbit.
Long before there was the tyranny of the rocket equation, there was also the tyranny of the wagon equation [1] that limited how far per-industrialized armies could move with wagons and animals (though the equation wasn't formalized).
Breguet range equation for airplanes also predates rocketry though postdates wagons. Airplanes can already have a significant portion of their weight as fuel. It has a logarithm of the mass ratio as one of the terms.
And by "significant", half or more their take-off weight.
Boeing B-52 Stratofortress: dry weight 38.25 tonne, fuel capacity 141.6 tonne, ratio 3.7:1. Max takeoff weight: 221.3 tonne. If at max fuel, that's 63% fuel. In practice, this aircraft refuels, often multiple times, on missions, which may span the globe.
Boeing 747-8: dry weight 220 tonne, fuel capacity 238.6 tonne, ratio 1.08:1. Max takeoff weight: 447.1 tonne. If at max fuel, that's 53% fuel.
Much of the fuel burn is on take-off and climb, meaning that cruise portions of flight are already at significantly less than take-off weight, and further reduce with time. You'll occasionally see long-distance flight profiles in which the altitude of the aircraft increases over the flight (in 1,000 ft increments given air traffic regulations) as fuel load decreases and maximum efficient altitude increases.
Logisticians were intimately aware of the concept but I’ve never seen an equation formally written down or mentioned anywhere in ancient or medieval texts. They would have used a simplified version for planning - counting days of food an army has and how far they can move from their bases on that food, plus how much they can forage for and how much they can take from the local population.
It looks more like a Civ5 game board than a neat equation like the ideal rocket equation.
A planet's mass doesn't matter so much as the density. If you look at a planet like Saturn, it is almost 100x heavier, but it's surface gravity is nearly identical to Earth's. What really matters for rockets though is the surface escape velocity, which scales like the square root of mass divided by radius. So for large radii it is slightly worse than density, which scales like mass divided by radius cubed. Ideally you would live on a small rocky planet (Mars ftw).
I tried to calculate a formula once, to convert increment of Earth's mass to increment of Earth's gravity for a planet of the same density, so not the same as escape velocity but sort of related. I'm not sure if it's actually correct but it was: x/x^(2/3) So i.e. for 5 Earth masses and the same density, it would be 1.71 of Earth's gravity on the surface, 10 masses -> 2.15 Earth's gravity.
Reasoning: Acceleration is GM/R^2 and planets R is like (x * Me / 4Pi / density)^1/3 . Directly proportional to M and inverse square root of radius, while the radius is directly proportional to (x)^(1/3)
Though the density for 2 planets made of the same stuff and different masses would probably be different due to differences in pressure in its internals? Just a guess.
