SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 24 2017, @12:53PM
There is not much detail in the Bloomberg article.
There's more here (long video news article)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KeIxq1lc0Hc [youtube.com]
He was testing avionics for the capsule.
The level of pickeyness was not up to his Marine core standards.
As a matter of safety, it's not clear if he was excessive or if SpaceX was doing something likely to be unsafe.
He said they were not keeping good traceability records on the history of parts used in the capsule.
It wasn't clear what else he alleged, or if he was knowledgeable of technical matters.
He raised the issue inside the SpaceX chain of command all the way to Musk.
He was later fired.
Technically, if he did not go outside SpaceX, special whistleblower rules might not apply?
Not sure if the court case will show many details on the significance (or not) of what actually happened.