When SpaceX launched it sixth test flight of Starship on Tuesday, it included a cargo for the first time – a toy banana. Now, you can buy yours banana plush toy on the SpaceX website.
But while the SpaceX store has plenty of holiday gifts available, including the usual suspects (hats, T-shirts, water bottles, a $400 chrome Starship modeland 175 dollars Starship Torch), the banana ($30) won't ship until next year.
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SpaceX CEO Elon Musk is known for selling unusual items on his other company's websites (Tesla has sold a cardboard Cybertruck cat litter box, short shortsAND perfume). The toy banana is something new, although it is of great importance to the company.
“Bananas have been used for quick visual comparisons for quite some time, and our teammates thought it was time to bring the venerable yellow fruit to Starship,” said Kate Tice, a quality engineering manager at SpaceX. in a statement. “Today, we're flying the Starship's first physical payload, which is, as you might have guessed, a banana.”
The first physical Starship cargo is a banana ?? pic.twitter.com/xvjV4JSxhg
— Gav Cornwell (@SpaceOffshore) November 19, 2024
According to Space.comthe toy banana was “a prop to gain government approval” for future Starship flights.
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“You can see our payload loaded with bananas, which is doubling as today's zero-gravity or zero-g indicator,” Tice said. “And while this load will remain inside the vehicle at all times and will not be deployed today, it did give us a chance to do a test run of the load approval processes with the FAA, and that's something we hope to do more after. year if we start flying our first Starlink satellites at “Godspeed,” bananas.”
A toy banana costs $30 and will be delivered in March. The company says it's roughly 8 inches long, or about 1/247 of the Starship (1,982″ long). You can buy a single banana or a whole bunch (and other gifts, here).
Today's Starship flight test has a special cargo on board – a banana! This universally accepted scale measurement is roughly the size of a Starlink Mini? pic.twitter.com/5ZuoIt3EbB
— Starlink (@Starlink) November 19, 2024