[sbuttgereit]

I"m not completely sure that's the case (and to be fair, I've not been following Starliner closely, so could well be wrong).

There are tests to prove out ideas during the course of development, but then there are tests which would perhaps be more accurately called "demonstrations"; where you're not trying to find flaws and refine your designs, but rather prove that you're [insert thing-name you're proving here] actually works the way you are representing it to work.

I understood this test to be more in the demonstration category, where Boeing would/should have had very high confidence, but they needed to prove to NASA that their spacecraft worked as advertised. If that's true, it was almost more a test on how much NASA should trust the confidence of the Boeing team than it was a test engineering and manufacture.

If that wasn't the character of the test, then I apologize for the distraction.

[FrojoS]

You are correct. The SpaceX version of this exact same test was literally called „Demo-1“. Ironically Boeing called it „Boeing Orbital Flight Test“.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_Orbital_Flight_Test

[camel_gopher]

Boeing boefted that one