When Stephen Furst went in to audition for Vir, he saw that everyone else in the waiting room had done their hair up into a Centauri crest; he was the only person without one. In a blind panic, he went to the bathroom and tried to use liquid soap to create a crest. When his name was called, he stumbled in, with a disheveled, lopsided crest, eyes tearing up from liquid soap running into them. He began to apologize profusely, stammering with run-on sentences. Series show runner J. Michael Straczynski and the producers looked at each other, declared "Oh my God, it's Vir!", and offered him the role on the spot.
J. Michael Straczynski made television history by becoming the first person to write an entire 22-episode season of a television series, this show's third season. He also wrote the fourth season and all but one episode of the fifth season.
The Babylon 5 station is an "O'Neill class space station". Gerard K. O'Neill was a physicist and space visionary who suggested using large rotating cylindrical habitats for future space stations.
During the first season, Commander Sinclair said, "This station creates gravity by rotation, so the room never stops spinning." Reportedly, the animating team had the station spinning at a near-Earth gravity simulation. This was determined by a physicist who was also a fan of the show, who determined the approximate size of the station by comparing it to the image of a human being on the edge of the station and extrapolating.
The StarFuries were the second cinematic spacecraft to fly according to Newtonian principles in a vacuum, rather than maneuvering like aircraft in an atmosphere. The Gunstar from The Last Star Fighter is the first.