I’ll admit, in the past I’ve been biased in favor of SpaceX. This has been for two reasons. First, I think they’re a company with a good product and philosophy. Second, I wouldn’t mind getting a paycheck from them.
Turns out, I’m not the only person out there wanting to work for SpaceX. Instead of nice words in a public forum, somebody took a slightly different route.
I’ve been hearing rumbling about this for a while now but it looks like it’s official:
According to court documents, SpaceX is suing Joe Fragola for spreading rumors about them. (Interestingly enough, they’re suing him personally, instead of suing his company) It would seem that Joe wanted to SpaceX to hire him (and his company?) to do an independent analysis of their Falcon 9 rocket. SpaceX turned him down; it seems that their rocket works just fine. Joe wasn’t too happy about this and started spreading rumors about SpaceX around NASA. About what you ask? Nothing serious, only that the Falcon 9 BLEW UP DURING LAUNCH. Specifically he claimed the Falcon 9 suffered two engine failures and the first stage exploded shortly after separation. (So in NASA speak this is really three separate failures in a single launch… In the rocket business we call that a bad thing and tend to look poorly on somebody who does this)
As one whose company has been on the receiving end of a NASA safety audit, I can tell you two things:
- They aren’t swift
- They aren’t fun
It’s not surprising that SpaceX turned Joe down. It’s also not surprising that they would take him to court for defamation. Considering how young a company they are, SpaceX has only its word to rely on. On top of that the company is seeking to do some very big things in the launch community and a negative attitude towards them in NASA would be disastrous.
Now let me emphasize that Mr. Joe Fragola is innocent until proven guilty. However, if it turns out that he has indeed been guilty of defamation, he might want to stay away from the internet. I’ve heard this Elon Musk guy has a some pull there.
October 25, 2011 at 3:58 pm
Generally I don’t learn article on blogs, however I wish to say that this write-up very pressured me to take a look at and do it! Your writing style has been surprised me. Thanks, quite great article.
October 25, 2011 at 5:43 pm
Thanks a lot for giving everyone an extraordinarily memorable chance to read in detail from this internet site. It’s often so brilliant and packed with plenty of enjoyable for me and my workplace acquaintances to search your site practically thrice in a week to read through the latest items you may have. And undoubtedly, I’m definitely astounded considering the exceptional tips you serve. Certain two points in this post are genuinely the most beneficial we’ve ever had.
October 26, 2011 at 10:16 am
hello there and thank you in your information – I’ve certainly picked up something new from right here. I did then again experience several technical issues the usage of this site, since I skilled to reload the web site lots of instances previous to I may get it to load properly. I had been pondering if your web hosting is OK? Now not that I am complaining, but slow loading cases instances will sometimes impact your placement in google and can harm your high quality rating if advertising and ***********|advertising|advertising|advertising and *********** with Adwords. Anyway I’m including this RSS to my email and could glance out for a lot extra of your respective interesting content. Make sure you replace this again soon..