Now, you can take the aging vehicle out of revenue service, and put it back in flight test; then you can crash it all you want. "Why do you keep crashing that thing?" "We've been trying to wear one out. Hallelujah, we've got data for O&M now." :-)
This is where biting the bullet early, and paying the development cost to ensure low *operations* cost, becomes very beneficial. Low Ops cost allows you to fly and fly and fly the fleet leader to build up true reliability and maintenance data, without losing your shirt in the process. This is the same reason we did 300+ igniter tests in one afternoon- because we could.
(If you have a dedicated ops team running multiple tail numbers, you may as well conduct operations at [at least] a minimum tempo regardless of having payloads to fly- the marginal flight cost comes out of the flight test/validation budget. Having random ground crew members routinely ride along on non-revenue flights also helps keep up safety conciousness... I look forward to the day when we can boast that *every* XCOR employee has flown aboard our vehicles.)
Doug
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