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 Crew Flight profile The SpaceShipOne pilot was Mike Melvill. There were three chase planes. All times are in PDT, which is seven hours behind UTC. This was the local civil time at the spaceport on the day of the flight. All measurements are first stated in the U.S. customary units in which they were originally reported, with conversions to SI units also given. The flight was planned to take off from Mojave Spaceport in the early morning, when wind conditions are most favourable. Takeoff was scheduled for 06:47, but was delayed because of winds gusting to 50 mph (20 m/s), which subsided after sunrise. White Knight, carrying SpaceShipOne, taxied to the runway at 07:00, and took off at 07:11. After takeoff, White Knight and SpaceShipOne ascended to the launch altitude, planned to be around 14 km. At 08:09 SpaceShipOne was released, glided for 6 s, then went into nose-up attitude and the rocket motor was ignited. The rocket motor was capable of burning for approximately 87 s, having been upgraded since the previous flight. It was planned to shut off the motor at an altitude of 345,000 feet (105 km), presumably to avoid pushing the envelope too