Environmental Testing: Launch environments are driven by the choice of launch vehicle. Satellites built  for New Space typically want to be compatible with many different launch vehicles for maximum access to  space and for flexibility to adapt to launch delays. In addition, new launch vehicles coming on the market  will not yet have well characterized launch environments. This scenario results in considerable  uncertainty in the vibration, acoustics and loads environment to test against. Testing against an envelope  of all launch vehicles is conservative but can result in a significant overtest. Some programs elect to use  the generalized environments from the NASA GEVS (General Environmental Verification Standard) or  comparable specifications to address this uncertainty. Using generic environments such as these  certainly carries some risk that specific environments from specific launch vehicles will exceed the tested  limit. There is no easy answer to address environments uncertainty, so the answer becomes a judgment  call balancing the risk of undertest versus the risk of false failures from overtest.   Qualification Testing: Formal qualification testing of one or more mechanisms never intended to fly prior  to completion of the flight articles was prevalent in the early days of the space program. In recent times,  most programs have moved to protoqual (or protoflight) testing in a quest to save the time and money  associated with testing units that will never fly.    As New Space moves into volume production, qualification testing becomes a much more viable and  valuable option. The premise of qualification testing is to test flight equivalent units to demonstrate high  margins. For example, vibration testing would be to levels twice as high for three times the flight duration.  Testing to these high margin levels is not smart for units intended to fly but is a great tool for showing the  robustness of a design. A plan to build hundreds or thousands of mechanisms draws two large benefits  from qualification testing; (i) high margin testing exposes flaws prior to the commitment to major  production and (ii) provides confidence that streamlined acceptance testing will be adequate to assure  reliability.  Acceptance Testing: There are significant costs of mechanism testing which provides an opportunity for  considerable savings during a flight production run if the risks of reduced testing are well managed. Given  that a mechanism has been through a formal qualification program, the objective of the acceptance test  program becomes a verification that each flight unit performs the same as the qualification units. Once  tests demonstrate that an individual unit has performance in-family with the qualification units, it follows  that the individual units are ready for flight. Paring a mechanisms acceptance test down to only those  tests necessary to prove manufacturing and performance consistent with qualification is key to realizing  the cost savings.    Sampling Tests: Consideration should be given to pulling one or more units off a production line on a  regular basis for more extensive testing to verify that inconsistencies have not crept into the production  process. This approach is quite common in non-space industries. This sampling testing could be a subset  of the qualification test to perform more extensive and insightful testing to ensure that small flaws are not  hiding from the simplified acceptance test. The periodic nature of the sampling tests acts to reduce  exposure to the misery of finding a problem after a very large quantity of mechanisms have already been  delivered. The sampling tests can be a powerful complement to an acceptance approach with very limited  testing on each unit.  Automation of Testing: As we move into testing of larger quantities of mechanisms there are many test  automation systems on the market which we can use to reduce the hand labor typically associated with  mechanisms test. Electrical pinout verification is made much easier with automated harness testers.  These automated testers make harness testing as simple as plugging the harness into the tester which  uses a computer driven electronic tester to very rapidly perform all the resistance, continuity, dielectric  and HiPot type measurements needed. Motor testing can be performed by all-in-one motor test stands in  which the motor is mechanically and electrically connected to a test stand including both a dynamometer  and harness tester. One can easily see how these automated testers can change a series of tests that  might take hours per unit into a couple automated tests that takes only minutes per unit and produce a  finished electronic test report. Reference 2 presents an approach for thermal testing of many gimbal  NASA/CP—2018-219887 455