The internal, pressurized payloads used on early flight of the Space Station will consist of many payloads and on-going investigations carried over from the Shuttle. Therefore, the Space Station will require a small payload carrier that can adapt Shuttle payloads to the Space Station and also offer these transitional payloads the full advantages of Space Station capabilities such as longer microgravity periods, increased crew availability, and increased resources such as power, data and heat rejection capability.
An end-to-end systems analysis of payload integration activities dictates the need for improved containers to fully exploit Space Station resources, improved operation efficiency and increase design flexibility. In response to this need, improved payload containers as well as a structure to adapt these and existing payload containers to the Space Station rack system have been designed
