It is useless to have so much untested hardware. I thing they would be more gained if they tested out the prototypes in atmosphere till 15K miles, gather data, iterate more. Doing it like this is like writing a software whiteout testing your code. (as beautiful your code can be it it is not functional in production it is basically useless), Guess the same principle applies here too no ?
Well in order to test untested prototypes you need the permission of the faa and the u.s fish and wildlife service in order to test new hardware (which takes forever , cus government is slow)
This is the price of not following the processes and trying to over smart the system. Elon it is very accustom with this and I guess the people around him just encourage him to do it.. You know the king without clothes story.
How wrong you are. Elon Musk recently admitted in an interview they had simply forgotten to apply for the actual launch license. SpaceX is completely transparent and is fully cooperating with the FAA and even doing things pro-actively. The FAA didn't even need to give them a list of changes, they'd made that list themselves and FAA fully supported it.
