Anyone who has worked on a system which required various levels of testing understands one basic premise:
If the system doesn't pass the test, that test was SUCCESSFUL -- it did not fail.
Any properly planned, prepared and executed test plan that identifies and gathers information pertaining to performance outside of the required or expected results is a success. It means that corrections and improvements must be applied and the tests re-run.
I look at these test results as a success, as the problems have been noted, and the fixes are being engineered.
What's the use of even running a test if we expect everything to work 100%? We could just skip all tests if the systems always passed with flying colors. It would save a bunch of money, resources and time in the release schedule.
They should congratulate their test teams. They are doing their jobs.
The article listed Lockheed-Martin as the prime contractor for this project. I'll have to do some looking into the sub-contractor list. There's a slate of "usual suspects" on every big-money gov't project. Whoever wins the contract normally hires subs to help -- in anticipation that those companies will do the same for them on other contracts.
I spent twenty+ years in experimental flight test.
We just validated what was built worked as designed and we then worked to correct
the usual problems that pop up.
We never were trying to figure out if such a deign would fail or not.
That is a different sort of testing and is called development.
Sounds like USA is still developing, although I understand the Chinese
took a NASA design that was abandoned due to cost and made it work.
We know how to do this "stuff", just too much government BS gets in the way.
Can NASA reuse their rockets? A civilian company Space X can.
USA problems is always due to Democrat party these days.
