The buried lede comes at the end of a new investigation.
Gerstenmaier, the NASA administrator who requested the review, left the agency several months after the conclusion of the probe. Less than a year later, he got a job at SpaceX, where he’s now the vice president of build and flight reliability.
News flash: SpaceX flight reliability has been very poor.
Earlier in the investigative reporting, a point was made that SpaceX would be more competitive if NASA didn’t reveal what it has found.
The probe spanned SpaceX facilities in California, Texas and Florida, the records show. Investigators interviewed 296 SpaceX employees “at all levels of personnel,” half of whom worked on the commercial crew program that shuttles astronauts to the International Space Station.
Despite the assessment’s hefty price tag and NASA’s insistence that it was “essential to the United States space program,” the agency covered the results of the probe in black ink, citing a public records exemption that allows it to withhold documents if they “could harm the competitive posture or business interests of a company.”
Look I’m not saying a top guy at NASA cut a deal to take a job and loads of “competitive” pay and stock after he came up with a safety report that paid SpaceX $5m and they wanted it hushed. That seems far, far too “paperclip” to be true.
Besides, the report is somehow still being hidden. Wouldn’t NASA staff left behind just open it to the public?
The space agency initially responded to BI’s request by claiming it didn’t have any records of the assessment’s results. Public records request logs, and emails provided by NASA, show that the agency told a Wall Street Journal reporter the same thing in 2022.
But after Business Insider reminded the agency that it had paid SpaceX $5 million in taxpayer dollars to conduct the investigation, NASA coughed up the letter initiating the probe, a scope of work, and the final report.
I really just don’t understand the series of “safety” steps here, let alone using huge amounts of taxpayer money for a contractor to investigate drug use after a very public display of drug use. Seems backwards.
A SpaceX top executive smokes drugs in public, a NASA official pays SpaceX $5 million to look around and report any evidence of drug use, and then SpaceX hires that official to lead its reliability program, afterwards denying any such report even existed… while rockets are so unreliable they keep going up in smoke.
