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A former Space Exploration Technologies Corp. technician told a jury he was fired for complaining to management that rocket-building test protocols weren't followed and results were falsified, jeopardizing the safety of eventual manned trips into orbit.
Jason Blasdell claims he took his concerns as high as SpaceX founder and Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk in the months before he was terminated in 2014, purportedly for being "disruptive."
A Los Angeles state court jury will be asked to decide whether Blasdell had good reason to believe testing documents were falsified and whether his firing was unjustified.
"He went up the chain of command as he had learned in the Marines was the proper procedure," Blasdell's lawyer, Carney Shegerian, told jurors in his opening statement Tuesday. "He had nothing personal to benefit from this other than to do the right thing."
[...] California Superior Court Judge William Fahey has ruled that the jury won't be second-guessing the scientific decisions of SpaceX's engineers or the business judgment of its managers. The trial is expected to take two weeks.
"Jason Blasdell is not a whistle-blower and this is not a whistle-blower case," SpaceX's lawyer, Lynne Hermle, said in her opening statement.
Source: Bloomberg
Have you ever been in this kind of situation? What did you do? How do you weigh the risks to the product, others, and yourself?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 24 2017, @11:48AM (2 children)
you mean, have i ever made an ass out of myself by not understanding something fully and talk about to someone a level or two above my boss and gotten fired for it? sure. have i ever suggested how a user department could get scheduled an app in dev and gotten fired for that? sure.
did i get others to share my senseless acts by telling them that i was right because i did what i had learned in another place of work? nope. i was wrong and it seems -- so was this guy.
i'm not whitewashing or hand-waving away labor abuses that musk's accused of elsewhere, but without stolen documents, this is just another idealistic naive person waking up to the whiles of those that run things.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 24 2017, @11:58AM
If your boss's boss also tells you your concerns are not warranted, it's time to update the resume. Continuing to push makes you a problem. The people that keep pushing anyway tend to not understand how negatively they come across, or otherwise have narcissistic tendencies that overrule their own good judgment.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 24 2017, @01:19PM
An engineer I knew was in the reverse situation, there were problems with the product (used in public transportation) and this guy felt that if there was an accident, it was likely that he was going to be the fall guy. He was very stressed out by this and all I could do was suggest that he keep a separate set of records of his work (stress analysis). That way, if he was put on the spot in an accident investigation, he would have a full set of his results to show, even if unethical managers had deleted/changed some of his work.
As far as I know, there have not been any accidents (the product was de-rated in operation, and inspected frequently). But the ending wasn't too happy, due to mental stress he had medical problems and retired early, withdrew to a very secluded rural area with no neighbors...