The premise of my post is not wrong, because if you read what I actually wrote, you will see that nowhere do I state that this test was conducted entirely as if

The premise of my post is not wrong, because if you read what I actually wrote, you will see that nowhere do I state that this test was conducted entirely as if it was a real manned mission to the ISS - of course, it wasn't, including for all sorts of facts that do not have anything to do with the previous history of the capsule. What I actually set out, in my first post, is a principle for regarding tests as being as significant as real operations, and it so happens that this principle still largely holds even when a test deviates to some extent from a real operation. I did not state this obvious extension because I did not anticipate a pointlessly pedantic response. Until the failure had been diagnosed, it would have been correct to consider whether the problem was entirely the consequence of the capsule's previous history, but by now, we are all - even you - agreed that the test did reveal a potentially serious problem that could be fixed. It turns out, fortunately, that tests do not have to be equivalent to live operations to be useful, because relevance does not depend on them being so (as this case demonstrates.)