The spacecraft carried a lander, Philae, designed to touch down on the comet, but Philae's landing did not go quite as planned.
Philip Kirschner, the executive vice president of the New Jersey Business and Industry Association, said today that the plan "is designed to touch the larger companies, and it does".
Ms. Palin said the tour will "celebrate the meaning of our nation's blueprints" and said the "pro-America" events were designed to touch on, among other things, the "survival of American exceptionalism," a topic that she has used to criticize Mr. Obama in the past.
Similar to SpaceX, the CST-100 is designed to touch down on land.
But the craft was also carrying a tiny lander, the British Beagle-2, which was designed to touch down and search for signs of life.
Never designed to touch down anywhere, NEAR-Shoemaker will be pulled to a final embrace with the 34-kilometer-long asteroid just before Valentine's Day, hitting the surface at the speed of a brisk walk.
But not everyone was convinced it would be possible to put Philae on the new comet, because the lander was designed to touch down on a significantly smaller comet with even less gravity.
The top window of the chamber was designed to touch the growth media in order to minimize signal loss due to refraction and to prevent the formation of condensation on the glass.
