This was the first of two projects to develop spaceflight carriers for miniaturized science experiments that would fly on the Space Shuttle at low cost. The market aim was to offer affordable space access tailored to small businesses, schools, colleges and start-up ventures. Designed was an open carrier tray to mount on the flat roof of the SPACEHAB pressurized laboratory module (photo top right) that flew regularly on Shuttle missions. The shallow tray occupies minimal volume on the module roof as demonstrated in a fit check of a full-size tray prototype at SPACEHAB's processing facility at Cape Kennedy (photo bottom right). About 800mm square, 100mm deep and machined out of aluminium plate (photo bottom left), the tray can accommodate 96 miniature experiments on a single flight, bringing the flight cost per experiment down to $15,000 -

$20,000. This was an extremely low price

range by spaceflight standards of the time.

Concerns over the costs of fabrication,

testing and flight certification on the module

roof led the design to be set aside in a favour

of a smaller version that would fly on a

recently developed SPACEHAB cargo carrier

framework instead of the module. This is

described in the next project in this group.