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)
“Is it not manifest that our academic institutions should have a wider scope; that they should not be timid and keep the ruts of the last generation, but that wise men thinking for themselves and heartily seeking the good of mankind, and counting the cost of innovation, should dare to arouse the young to a just and heroic life; that the moral nature should be addressed in the school-room, and children should be treated as the high-born candidates of truth and virtue?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“It is manifest therefore that they who have sovereign power, are immediate rulers of the church under Christ, and all others but subordinate to them. If that were not, but kings should command one thing upon pain of death, and priests another upon pain of damnation, it would be impossible that peace and religion should stand together.”
—Thomas Hobbes (1579–1688)