The thread installs Macondo as a public processing case: a negative-pressure test that showed 1,400 psi was declared a pass, inside a Minerals Management Service that both collected royalties and signed the permits, after which the blowout preventer did not seal the well. The unresolved question is which repair would have kept the 8 p.m. reading a fail, or kept the well shut if it was not: a written success criterion that unexplained pressure is already a no, and that a verbal theory cannot reopen it; a safety office that does not also take the rent (the Commission structural model, later BOEM/BSEE); or a last-resort stack whose emergency systems are actually inspected and that can shear a pipe that has moved off-center (the CSB Volume 2 model). Those are not substitutes. MMS was split. CSB Volume 3 still found minimal compliance in the Gulf. The live question is which of those, if installed before 20 April, would have stopped the displacement of mud with seawater after a test that had already spoken.