The early decades of development saw most of the work in the areas of concept development, technology design, and prototype production. However, as Gravity Probe B moved toward a NASA flight program in the mid-1980s, managers adopted the concept of “incremental prototyping.” This approach called for the rapid development and testing of hardware.
The early decades of development saw most of the work in the areas of concept development, technology design, and prototype production. However, as Gravity Probe B moved toward a NASA flight program in the mid-1980s, managers adopted the concept of “incremental prototyping.” This approach called for the rapid development and testing of hardware. Here, NASA and Stanford considered various testing for each new prototype, one of which included a preliminary technology evaluation on the space shuttle known as STORE, the Shuttle Test of the Relativity Experiment. While the Challenger accident lead to the cancellation of that test, incremental prototyping continued over the final decades.
Credit: Stanford University/Barron Storey