Spectacle
As with SpaceShipOne's previous flight, a crowd of thousands watched from Mojave Spaceport. Television coverage also occurred. SPACE.com provided live video from SpaceShipOne's cockpit.
Distinguished attendees included:
- Sean O'Keefe, NASA Administrator
- Erik Lindbergh, grandson of the pioneering aviator Charles Lindbergh and a member of the X PRIZE Foundation board
- James Cameron, action film director
- John Landis, film director
- William Readdy, astronaut
At 06:09, shortly before planned takeoff, spectators were told to stay at the spaceport after the flight, to hear a "major announcement" about the future of the X PRIZE Foundation. As of October 4, 2004 it appears that no such announcement was actually made.
Spectator reaction was more muted than for SpaceShipOne flight 15P, the first SpaceShipOne flight to have spectators, which was also the first privately-funded human spaceflight.
Read more about this topic: SpaceShipOne Flight 16P
Famous quotes containing the word spectacle:
“What spectacle can be more edifying or more seasonable, than that of Liberty and Learning, each leaning on the other for their mutual and surest support?”
—James Madison (1751–1836)
“We know no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality.”
—Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800–1859)
“The spectacle of misery grew in its crushing volume. There seemed to be no end to the houses full of hunted starved children. Children with dysentery, children with scurvy, children at every stage of starvation.... We learned to know that the barometer of starvation was the number of children deserted in any community.”
—Mary Heaton Vorse (1874–1966)