SpaceX rolls Starship Flight 6 spacecraft to pad ahead of Nov. 18 launch — and it’s wearing a banana (photos)

SpaceX is gearing up for the sixth test flight of its Starship megarocket, which is now less than a week away.

Elon Musk‘s company has rolled the sixth Starship vehicle’s 165-foot-tall (50-meter-tall) upper stage out to the launch pad at its Starbase site in South Texas for testing ahead of the planned Nov. 18 liftoff.

SpaceX documented the milestone on X, posting three photos of the move on Tuesday (Nov. 12).

One of the photos is a closeup that focuses on some colorful artwork adorning the stainless-steel spacecraft — a pixelated, smiling cartoon banana holding a relatively realistic banana.

This is apparently a reference to the “banana for scale” joke that engineers and other aerospace professionals — including United Launch Alliance CEO Tory Bruno — like to make.

Related: Starship and Super Heavy explained

Starship is the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built. The vehicle consists of the upper stage — known as Starship, or just “Ship” — and a huge first-stage booster called Super Heavy. When these two elements are stacked, the rocket stands nearly 400 feet (122 m) tall.

Both Starship stages are designed to be fully and rapidly reusable, a breakthrough SpaceX believes will usher in a new era of spaceflight and exploration. 

Starship has flown five times to date — in April and November of 2023 and March, June and October of this year. During the most recent flight, which occurred on Oct. 13, SpaceX successfully landed Super Heavy back on the launch pad, catching the giant booster with the “chopstick” arms of Starbase’s launch tower. 

The company will try to repeat this feat on Flight 6. The upper stage, meanwhile, will splash down in the Indian Ocean, as it did on Flight 5.

Michael Wall is a Senior Space Writer with Space.com and joined the team in 2010. He primarily covers exoplanets, spaceflight and military space, but has been known to dabble in the space art beat. His book about the search for alien life, “Out There,” was published on Nov. 13, 2018. Before becoming a science writer, Michael worked as a herpetologist and wildlife biologist. He has a Ph.D. in evolutionary biology from the University of Sydney, Australia, a bachelor’s degree from the University of Arizona, and a graduate certificate in science writing from the University of California, Santa Cruz. To find out what his latest project is, you can follow Michael on Twitter.