ACCESS: status and pre-flight performance

Establishing improved spectrophotometric standards is important for a broad range of missions and is relevant to many astrophysical problems. ACCESS, Absolute Color Calibration Experiment for Standard Stars", is a series of rocket-borne sub-orbital missions and ground-based experiments designed to enable improvements in the precision of the astrophysical flux scale through the transfer of absolute laboratory detector standards from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to a network of stellar standards with a calibration accuracy of 1% and a spectral resolving power of 500 across the 0.35 - 1.7μm bandpass. This paper describes the payload status, sub-system testing, and data transfer for the ACCESS instrument.