Abstract
STEP is one of a number of missions now being developed to take advantage of the quiet space environment to carry out very sensitive gravitational experiments. Using pairs of concentric free-falling proof-masses, STEP will be able to test the Equivalence Principle (EP) to a sensitivity at least five orders of magnitude better than currently achievable on ground. The EP is a founding principle of general relativity and STEP is the most sensitive experiment of this type planned so far, aiming at 1 part in 1018. Recently the GAUGE mission was proposed to the European Space Agency and this contained a variant of the STEP experiment as its central payload element with a number of others probing various aspects of the quantum gravity interface. Both STEP and GAUGE payload concepts will be presented, together with their performance parameters.
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