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?
Related Stories
An editorial by Jason Rhian discusses NASA's handling of the Orb-3 (Orbital Sciences) and CRS-7 (SpaceX) accidents. Both were Commercial Resupply Service missions to the International Space Station. SpaceX intends to fly NASA astronauts using Falcon rockets within the next couple of years:
A recent post appearing on the blog Parabolic Arc noted NASA will not be releasing a public report on the findings of the SpaceX Falcon 9 CRS-7 explosion that resulted in the loss of the launch vehicle, the Dragon spacecraft, and the roughly $118 million in supplies and hardware the spacecraft was carrying. The post also notes that the Orb-3 accident was handled differently by NASA, but were the two accidents so distinct as to warrant two totally dissimilar approaches?
The premise of the Parabolic Arc report was somewhat inaccurate. NASA didn't refuse to issue a public report; the truth is, no public report was ever produced. NASA officials noted on Wednesday, July 19, that, as the agency was not required to create such a report, one was not generated.
When asked about the discrepancy between the two incidents, NASA officials noted that the Orb-3 failure had occurred on a NASA launch pad (at the agency's Wallops Flight Facility Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport's Pad-0A – which is managed by Virginia Space, not NASA). Whereas the Falcon 9 CRS-7 mission had launched from SpaceX's own pad (SLC-40, which is not their pad it was leased to them by the U.S. Air Force) on a commercial flight licensed by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). Therefore, NASA was not required to produce a report on the CRS-7 accident. However, Orb-3 was also licensed by the FAA, making this distinction tenuous.
The problem submitted by SpaceX as the root cause of the CRS-7 accident was a failed strut in the rocket's second stage. SpaceX stated that it had fixed the problem and, for all intents and purposes, the matter was dropped.
Fast forward 14 months and another Falcon 9, with the $185 million Amos-6 spacecraft, exploded while just sitting on the pad, taking the rocket, its payload, and some of the ground support facilities at Canaveral's Space Launch Complex 40 with it. Since the Amos-6 accident, SpaceX has moved its operations to Kennedy Space Center's historic Launch Complex 39A, under the 20-year lease with NASA that SpaceX entered into in April of 2014.
With limited information made available to the public, conspiracy theories, including those involving it being struck by a drone and snipers hired by SpaceX's competition, sprung up in articles and on comment boards on sites such as NASASpaceFlight.com and elsewhere regarding the cause of the Amos-6 explosion. This demonstrated the need for a transparent accounting of accidents involving public-private efforts such as NASA's Commercial Resupply Services contract.
Extra: Meanwhile, NASA has growing confidence in the test flight schedule for Boeing and SpaceX's crewed flights: http://spacenews.com/nasa-and-companies-express-growing-confidence-in-commercial-crew-schedules/
Related: NASA Advisory Committee Skeptical of SpaceX Manned Refueling Plan
SpaceX Identifies Cause of September Explosion
After Months of Delay Following Explosion, SpaceX Finally Launches More Satellites
Problems With SpaceX Falcon 9 Design Could Delay Manned Missions
Elon Musk Accuses Tesla Employee of Being a Union Agitator
SpaceX Technician says Concerns about Test Results Got Him Fired
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Wednesday May 24 2017, @10:42AM (5 children)
So the there will be [inc.com] no asshole rule [wikipedia.org] that keep SpaceX [wikipedia.org] clean from, well assholes [businessinsider.com] is now depreciated?
That is actually quite sad. At least I had higher expectations on that company. Or is it just a smoke screen where some moronic worker law collides with doing the right thing? or is SpaceX not being a good boy towards the "master"? the one with magic letters etc. It might be that some project they don't care for they will also ignore safety protocols because that explicit project is not interesting to the primary goal. Btw, SolarCity also have a serious worker relation issue, but Elon is just chairman there. It's a side company to the primary mission.
This will put Tesla, Hyperloop (transport), SolarCity (solarpanel installations), OpenAI (AI research), The Boring Company (tunnel boring), Neuralink (brain interface) etc also in a less than favorable light.
(Score: 0, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 24 2017, @11:30AM (4 children)
Remember this is the company run by the guy who insisted that the rocket which blew up was purposefully sabotaged by a sniper's bullet.
I don't know why people expected more from one of the founders of paypal...
(Score: 2) by Kell on Wednesday May 24 2017, @01:10PM (3 children)
I don't recall Musk ever actually claiming that. Do you have a source?
Scientists ask questions. Engineers solve problems.
(Score: 4, Informative) by tonyPick on Wednesday May 24 2017, @02:35PM (2 children)
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]
I wouldn't describe this as "insisted" though...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 24 2017, @06:24PM (1 child)
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
(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...
(Score: 3, Interesting) by pTamok on Wednesday May 24 2017, @11:54AM (1 child)
Elon Musk was likely advised by his direct reports that the man was a troublemaker, and I would be surprised if he took a direct interest in the case.
It is entirely possible that test results were falsified: or at best, ignored. You only need to see the shenanigans that went on at NASA, as described by Richard Feynman ( "an enormous disparity between the management estimate and the judgment of the engineers"..."an almost incredible lack of communication between themselves and their working engineers"*) so see the effect of applying pressure to middle managers to deliver results. Elon Musk is known to be demanding.
So while I have no idea of the facts of the case, it is at least plausible that test results were not given the credence they should have been. It has happened before, and will no doubt happen again. It might have done here.
*https://science.ksc.nasa.gov/shuttle/missions/51-l/docs/rogers-commission/Appendix-F.txt
(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.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 24 2017, @02:18PM (3 children)
So this guy, a technician, is 'sure' that the engineers, all of them, are providing falsified test results.
And his coworkers are doing it too.
As such, he started altering procedures and falsifying test results in order to 'meet quota', because 'everyone has to be doing it'.
He even went as far as to talk to the founder and admit that he is falsifying results in order to complete items in a reasonable time period and is sure that everyone else is doing it too.
Then he got fired.
Now, there is a chance he is correct, everyone is falsifying results, dozens of engineers are putting there careers on the line- the desire to make SpaceX work is pretty strong so it is not impossible.
Or, he is incorrect. He was not able to pull his own weight without 'cheating', and he accused everyone else of doing it as well because he can't see a situation where others can be getting so much more work done than he can.
I can't see this firing as anything but legitimate- he actually got to speak with the founder of the company and admitted to falsifying results while expressing concerns that others are doing so.
The question is- are the engineers and other technicians falsifying results as he accuses, or was he just a sub-par performer who had to 'cheat' to keep up with peers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 24 2017, @03:45PM
Yeah it doesn't add up. He is a trouble maker to say they least. Most likely he is a big talker, with an embellished idea about his own capabilities. He got exactly what he deserved. As a manager, if one person was causing trouble among the ranks of my underlings, that guy would be gone.
(Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Wednesday May 24 2017, @04:05PM
Having only read TFS, it's unclear to me where you get the above information. Is there any assertion on the part of SpaceX that this person falsified results? Is there any evidence that he did?
If the answer to the latter is "no," then I have to wonder what your goal might be in making such unsupported assertions. As an empiricist, I like to have my facts straight. The problem is, you included no facts, just assertions without evidence.
I'm not saying you're incorrect, but you don't provide any evidence to accept your assertions.
In the absence of any evidence, if I were to assert that Blasdell complained about issues because his transsexual, midget furry boyfriend suggested he do so, that would, in my mind, have the same weight as your assertions.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 2) by sjames on Wednesday May 24 2017, @04:32PM
It's also possible that he's language lawyering the test procedures and considering them invalid because they aren't being done exactly according to his odd interpretation of the written procedure.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 24 2017, @06:26PM
But not too disruptive.
Do not question the cult of the Musky anus.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Wednesday May 24 2017, @06:53PM
My complaint was that we weren't testing our hardware RAID controllers in the same configuration as the customers used them.
This was during apple's gradual migration to 64-but. Command-line programs could be 64-bit, but the kernel was 32-bit, with some Apple Voodoo to transform the system calls.
Our test tool, which ran in user space, was only 32-bit.
Our test tool developer was young and completely inexperienced with the Mac. He didn't know how to build software with Xcode. I offered to help him, with the result that my manager ordered me not to, so the company could make its quarterly revenue target.
That manager had once been a tester on my team, but was promoted to our manager. That was a really stupid thing for the company to do. Make him a manager, sure that's fine, but he should have been assigned to a different team
One other time my coworker was promoted to my manager. I didn't complain but applied for an internal transfer to a different team.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]