The Barbados HARP Gun, was part of Project HARP, short for High Altitude Research Project, which was a joint project of the United States Department of Defense and Canada's Department of National Defence created with the goal of studying ballistics of re-entry vehicles at low cost; whereas most such projects used expensive and failure-prone rockets, HARP used a non-rocket spacelaunch method based on a very large gun to fire the models to high altitudes and speeds.
