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posted by martyb on Wednesday May 24 2017, @09:05AM   Printer-friendly
from the would-YOU-ride-on-that-rocket? dept.

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?


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  • (Score: 4, Informative) by tonyPick on Wednesday May 24 2017, @02:35PM (2 children)

    by tonyPick (1237) on Wednesday May 24 2017, @02:35PM (#514822) Homepage Journal

    Sounded odd to me as well, so I dug around and the nearest I can find to the OP assertion is:

    from http://spacenews.com/spacexs-musk-says-sabotage-unlikely-cause-of-sept-1-explosion-but-still-a-worry/ [spacenews.com]

    Here is the statement attributed to him:

    “The other thing we discovered is that we can exactly replicate what happened on the launch pad if someone shoots the rocket. We don’t think that is likely this time around, but we are definitely going to have to take precautions against that in the future. We looked at who would want to blow up a SpaceX rocket. That turned out to be a long list. I think it is unlikely this time, but it is something we need to recognize as a real possibility in the future.”

    I wouldn't describe this as "insisted" though...

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 24 2017, @06:24PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 24 2017, @06:24PM (#515001)

    I wouldn't describe this as "insisted" though...

    Well... I'm not saying tonyPick is domestically abusing his significant other, nor am I saying that he enjoys Nickelback, but it is something we need to recognize as a real possibility.

    See what I did there?

    • (Score: 2, Touché) by khallow on Thursday May 25 2017, @04:01AM

      by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Thursday May 25 2017, @04:01AM (#515269) Journal
      Yes, false equivalence. The difference is that someone can shoot a rocket and the results would be similar to what actually happened.