'It is bananas:' Toy fruit turns into first zero-g indicator to fly on SpaceX Starship

A synthetic banana floated peacefully within the microgravity surroundings of outer house on Tuesday (Nov. 19). Not needing its connected tethers, it simply hung there, suspended within the bay of its metal spacecraft’s in any other case empty cargo maintain.

The fake-but-full-size fruit made historical past because the first zero-gravity indicator to fly on a SpaceX Starship.

“Bananas have been used for fast visible comparisons for fairly a while, and our teammates thought it was time to deliver the honored yellow fruit to Starship,” stated Kate Tice, a high quality engineering supervisor at SpaceX and co-host of the corporate’s stay launch webcast. “Immediately, we’re flying Starship’s first-ever bodily payload, which is, as you may need guessed, a banana.”

A toy banana floats on the finish of its tethers contained in the payload bay of a SpaceX Starship throughout a flight check, Nov. 19, 2024. (Picture credit score: SpaceX through X)

A digital camera mounted in Starship’s payload bay revealed the toy banana held by cables tied to its high and backside. Greater than only a visible sign that Starship had reached house on its suborbital trajectory, the banana was additionally a stand-in for gaining the federal government’s approval to start launching extra purposeful payloads on future Starship flights.

Associated: SpaceX Starship launches banana to house, skips big rocket catch on sixth check flight (video, photographs)

“You possibly can see our stuffed banana payload, which is doubling as at this time’s zero gravity or zero-g indicator. And whereas this payload will stay contained in the automobile always and won’t be deployed at this time, it did give us an opportunity to do a check run of payload approval processes with the FAA [Federal Aviation Administration], and that is one thing that we’re hoping to do subsequent 12 months if we begin flying our first Starlink satellites on Starship,” stated Tice. “Godspeed, banana.”

Although arduous to see on the in-flight views, if the banana aboard Starship matched the toy that Tice and her co-host, SpaceX manufacturing engineer supervisor Jessica Anderson, had with them and that are now out there to pre-order for $30 by way of SpaceX’s on-line store, the 8-inch-long (20 centimeters) yellow fruit has printed on it “(For Scale).” It additionally bears SpaceX’s mission patch for Tuesday’s check flight, which is a parody of the blue decal discovered on Dole bananas.

The banana theme prolonged to the outside of Starship as nicely. Affixed to both facet of the 165-foot-tall (50 meters) spacecraft had been 4-foot-tall (1.2 m) stickers of a pixelated cartoon banana holding an actual-size banana (for scale).

“A single banana is about 1/247 of Starship,” learn the outline on SpaceX’s web site. The dimensions contains Tremendous Heavy, Starship’s 232-foot-tall (71 m) booster.

photo of a cartoon banana painted on the side of a silver spacecraft

A 4-foot-tall, pixelated cartoon banana (holding an precise measurement fruit) adorned all sides of SpaceX’s Starship on its sixth flight. (Picture credit score: SpaceX)

Happily, Tuesday’s check flight — the sixth in SpaceX’s collection proving Starship is able to fly to the moon and Mars — didn’t go bananas. The mission achieved all of its principal goals, together with demonstrating that Starship might relight its Raptor rocket engines as soon as in house, a requirement for getting into orbit on future launches.

The mission lifted off from SpaceX’s Starbase launch facility in south Texas as scheduled at 4:00 p.m. CST (5:00 p.m. EST or 2200 GMT), establishing Starship’s first daytime splashdown within the Indian Ocean about 65 minutes later. Within the interim, Tremendous Heavy efficiently made a tender water touchdown within the Gulf of Mexico, having been waved off from making an attempt one other tower catch at its launch web site, as first achieved on the automobile’s fifth check flight in October.

Along with its in-space engine check, Starship was outfitted with new secondary thermal safety supplies and had sections of its warmth protect tiles eliminated the place catch-enabling {hardware} could also be put in on subsequent automobiles. The ship additionally adopted a better angle of assault within the ultimate part of its descent again to Earth, purposefully stressing the bounds of its flap management to gather information on future touchdown profiles.

a blue spaceflight mission patch, showing a silver spacecraft above a yellow banana and the phrase "it's bananas!"

SpaceX’s mission patch for Starship Flight 6 is a parody of the label on Dole bananas. (Picture credit score: SpaceX)

The flight’s “It is Bananas” theme continued two traditions at SpaceX. The corporate was the primary within the U.S. to borrow the Russian customized of flying small toys as zero-g indicators, tracing again to the primary human spaceflight in 1961. Starting with the primary flight by a Dragon spacecraft to the Worldwide House Station, SpaceX has launched a menagerie of plush dolls on its crewed missions, together with a stuffed planet Earth, an Albert Einstein doll and a small however rising pack of toy canines.

SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk has additionally made a behavior of selecting “odd” objects to be the primary cargo to fly on every of the corporate’s rockets. On Falcon 9, the primary Dragon to fly to and from Earth orbit carried with it a wheel of Le Brouere cheese, a nod to a Monty Python skit. On Falcon Heavy, Musk launched his personal Tesla Roadster electrical automotive on a trajectory that took it out past the orbit of Mars.