The SIMPLE boom is a novel, high-strain composite, bi-stable tape-spring actuated, meter-class deployable boom developed at the Air Force Research Laboratory. This boom demonstrates new free deployment technology enabled by high-strain composite materials and a minimal shroud design. A flight qualification program is developed for validation and verification of the boom performance. This program includes gravity off-loaded deployment, thermal vacuum deployment, modal survey, and thermal deformation tests. A customized six degree of freedom gravity off-load system with bus and payload mass simulators is developed to enable full system dynamics testing. Testing the performance of free deploying structures on CubeSats represents a new challenge for off-loading technology, and here the first focused approaches and solutions for these off-loading technologies are presented. The boom passed all flight qualification testing, and results of the testing program are included.
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