Toy banana becomes the first zero-g indicator to fly on SpaceX Starship

On November 20, 2024By Pranco

An artificial banana floated peacefully in the microgravity environment of space on Tuesday (Nov. 19). No longer needing the tied ropes, he simply hung there, suspended in the space of the otherwise empty cargo hold of his steel spacecraft.

The fake-but-large fruit has made history as the first gravity indicator to fly on a SpaceX spaceship.

“Bananas have long been used for quick visual comparisons and our teammates thought it was time to bring the revered yellow fruit to market. Starship” says Kate Tice, quality engineering manager at SpaceX and co-host of the company’s live launch webcast. “Today we’re flying Starship’s very first physical payload, which, as you might have guessed, is a banana.”

A toy banana floats at the end of its ropes in the cargo bay of a SpaceX spaceship. — A toy banana floats at the end of its tethers in the cargo bay of a SpaceX spaceship during a flight test, Nov. 19, 2024. (Image credit: SpaceX via X)

A camera mounted in Starship’s cargo bay revealed the toy banana held by cables attached to the top and bottom. More than just a visual signal that Starship had reached space on its suborbital trajectory, the banana was also a proxy for obtaining government approval to launch more targeted payloads on future Starship flights.

“You can see our stuffed banana load, which doubles as the current zero-gravity or zero-g indicator. And while this payload will remain in the vehicle at all times and will not be deployed today, it did give us the opportunity to do a test run of the payload approval processes at the FAA (Federal Aviation Administration), and that’s something we’ll be doing next year hope to do when we fly for the first time Starlink satellites on Starship,” Tice said. “Godspeed, banana.”

Although difficult to see during the flight, if the banana on board Starship matched the toy that Tice and her co-host, SpaceX production engineer Jessica Anderson, were carrying, which now available for pre-order for $30 through SpaceX’s online store, the 8-inch-tall yellow fruit has “(For Scale)” printed on it. It also carries SpaceX’s mission patch for Tuesday’s test flight, a parody of the blue emblem on Dole bananas.

The banana theme also extended to the exterior of Starship. On either side of the 50-meter-tall spacecraft were 1.2-meter-long stickers of a pixelated cartoon banana with a full-size banana (for scale).

“A single banana is about 1/247 of the spaceship,” read the description on SpaceX’s website. The scale includes the Super Heavy, Starship’s 71-meter high booster.

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

A four-foot-tall, pixelated cartoon banana (with a full-size fruit) graced each side of SpaceX’s spaceship during its sixth flight. (Image credit: SpaceX)

Fortunately, Tuesday’s test flight is the sixth in SpaceX’s series proving that Starship is ready to fly to the moon And Mars – didn’t go to bananas. The mission accomplished all its key goals, including demonstrating that Starship could reignite its Raptor rocket engines once in orbit, a requirement for reaching orbit on future launches.

The mission took off as scheduled at 4:00 PM CST (5:00 PM EST or 10:00 PM GMT) from SpaceX’s Starbase launch facility in South Texas, with Starship’s first daytime landing in the Indian Ocean occurring approximately 65 minutes later. In the meantime, Super Heavy successfully made a soft-water landing in the Gulf of Mexico after being rejected from another attempt tower catch at the launch siteas it was first achieved during the vehicle’s fifth test flight in October.

In addition to the engine test in space, Starship was fitted with new secondary thermal protection materials and portions of the heat shield tiles were removed where capture-enabled hardware could be installed on subsequent vehicles. The ship also adopted a higher angle of attack in the final phase of its descent Earthdeliberately emphasizing the limits of flap control to gather data on future landing profiles.

a blue spaceflight mission field, with a silver spacecraft above a yellow banana and the phrase "they're bananas!"

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

The flight’s “It’s Bananas” theme continued two traditions at SpaceX. The company was the first in the US to adopt the Russian practice of flying small toys as zero-g indicators, dating back to the first manned spaceflight in 1961. Beginning with the first flight by a Dragon spacecraft to the International Space Station SpaceX has a menagerie of plush dolls on his manned missions, including a stuffed planet Earth, an Albert Einstein doll and a small but growing one pack of toy dogs.

Founder and CEO of SpaceX Elon Musk has also made a habit of choosing “foreign” objects as the first payload to fly on each of the company’s rockets. On Falcon 9the first dragon to fly to and from orbit, carrying a wheel of Le Brouere cheesea nod to a Monty Python sketch. Musk launched on Falcon Heavy his own Tesla Roadster electric car on a trajectory that took it beyond the orbit of Mars.