Manifest
Under Ansari X PRIZE rules, the flight was required to carry 180 kg payload, to simulate two 90 kg human passengers. Scaled Composites announced early on that this, their first X PRIZE flight, would carry inanimate payload rather than live passengers. The payload included:
- X PRIZE flight monitoring equipment, known as the "gold box"
- the Explorers Club flag, by arrangement between the Explorers Club and the X PRIZE Foundation
- video equipment, producing a video stream that was broadcast live
- mementos from team members, including:
- photographs
- personal tools, including Burt Rutan's college slide rule
- tree seedlings
- the ashes of Burt Rutan's mother, Irene Rutan, who had died a few years earlier
- an heirloom watch
- a copy of Charles Lindbergh's book The Spirit of St. Louis
- a teddy bear being carried for the British charity Great North Air Ambulance
- lead ballast to make up the payload mass
The practice of carrying arbitrary non-functional items into space, which has previously been carried out by many Space Shuttle missions, is evidence that space travel is still widely seen as special. The value of symbolic items increases enormously if the item has flown in space, due to the restricted access to space. The teddy bear being carried for charity will be auctioned at a much higher price than it would otherwise command. Scaled Composites employees were made to sign a contract forbidding them from selling the mementos they put on the flight.
SpaceShipOne and White Knight bore several logos for the flight. These were:
- Scaled Composites
- "SpaceShipOne: a Paul G. Allen project" on SpaceShipOne
- "White Knight" on White Knight
- Virgin Galactic, on the tails, following the signing earlier in the week of an agreement for Virgin Galactic to license Tier One technology for space tourism
- Virgin, on the fuselage
- Ansari X PRIZE, as required by X PRIZE rules
- The Spirit of St. Louis, a science center
- M&M's, apparently in an act of sponsorship inspired by Melvill's antics with M&M's during flight 15P
- 7-Up Plus
- Champ Car World Series
Read more about this topic: SpaceShipOne Flight 16P
Famous quotes containing the word manifest:
“You should never assume contempt for that which it is not very manifest that you have it in your power to possess, nor does a wit ever make a more contemptible figure than when, in attempting satire, he shows that he does not understand that which he would make the subject of his ridicule.”
—William Lamb Melbourne, 2nd Viscount (1779–1848)
“We have to be despised by somebody whom we regard as above us, or we are not happy; we have to have somebody to worship and envy, or we cannot be content. In America we manifest this in all the ancient and customary ways. In public we scoff at titles and hereditary privilege, but privately we hanker after them, and when we get a chance we buy them for cash and a daughter.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“It matters little comparatively whether the fields fill the farmer’s barn. The true husbandman will cease from anxiety, as the squirrels manifest no concern whether the woods will bear chestnuts this year or not, and finish his labor with every day, relinquishing all claim to the produce of his fields, and sacrificing in his mind not only his first but his last fruits also.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)