OM wrote:
[snip]
...On the other hand, the STB had one serious success story. On A15,
it was used in conjunction with a Falcon feather to prove Gallileo's
theory that gravity was a constant.

Don't forget about the DUBPT. NASA spent millions of
dollars developing a toilet plunger for use in zero-g for
the Apollo program, the Russians used a pencil. A
malfunction in the DUBPT during the Apollo 8 flight forced
NASA into a redesign of the system, leading to the DUBPT
Mark II for the Shuttle program, though a prototype of the
Mark II was used on ASTP.