The purpose of force limited vibration testing is to alleviate overtesting associated with the unrealistically high base reaction forces that occur at the test item resonances in conventional base-drive vibration tests (Blake, 1954 [1]; Salter, 1964 [2]; Murfin, 1968 [3]; Ratz, 1966 [4]; Heinricks, 1967 [5]; Painter, 1967 [6]); Smallwood, 1989 [7]; Scharton, et al., 1989 [8]; Smallwood, 1990 [9]; Scharton, 1995 [10]). The purpose of this Handbook is to provide an approach that may be consistently followed by those desiring to use force limiting, without having to conduct an extensive literature search or research and development effort before conducting the test. This Handbook describes the rationale behind force limiting, the hardware required for implementation, the various methods for deriving force-limit specifications, and three flight experiments in which the base reaction forces were measured. NASA Endorsed.