SpaceX Starship launches banana to space, skips giant rocket catch on 6th test flight (video, photos) A 4-foot-tall, pixelated cartoon banana (holding an actual size fruit) adorned each side of SpaceX's Starship on its sixth flight. (Image credit: SpaceX) Fortunately, Tuesday's test flight — the sixth in SpaceX's series proving Starship is ready to fly to the moon and Mars — did not go bananas. The mission achieved all of its main objectives, including demonstrating that Starship could relight its Raptor rocket engines once in space, a requirement for entering 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), setting up Starship's first daytime splashdown in the Indian Ocean about 65 minutes later. In the interim, Super Heavy successfully made a soft water landing in the Gulf of Mexico, having been waved off from attempting another tower catch at its launch site, as first achieved on the vehicle's fifth test flight in October. In addition to its in-space engine test, Starship was outfitted with new secondary thermal protection materials and had sections of its heat shield tiles removed where catch-enabling hardware may be installed on subsequent vehicles. The ship also adopted a higher angle of attack in the final phase of its descent back to Earth, purposefully stressing the limits of its flap control to collect data on future landing profiles. SpaceX's mission patch for Starship Flight 6 is a parody of the label on Dole bananas. (Image credit: SpaceX)