SpaceX is going to court over a would-be consultant’s claims that their rockets are unsafe:
According to SpaceX’s filing with the Fairfax County circuit court in Virginia, Joseph Fragola, veep at tech consulting firm Valador, tried to obtain a hefty deal from SpaceX at the beginning of June:
Fragola attempted to obtain a consulting contract from SpaceX worth as much as $1 million. He claimed that SpaceX needed an “independent” analysis of its rocket to bolster its reputation with NASA based on what he called an unfair “perception” about SpaceX. SpaceX did not respond favorably to Fragola’s offer.
The rocket company — which as everyone knows is helmed, CTO’d and in part bankrolled by famous nerdwealth kingpin Elon Musk — says it then found out that Fragola had subsequently done his level best to create such a perception:
SpaceX subsequently leamed that Fragola has been contacting officials in the United States Government to make disparaging remarks about SpaceX, which have created the very “perception” that he claimed SpaceX needed his help to rectify.
For instance, in an email he wrote on June 8, 2011, to Bryan O’Connor, a NASA official at NASA’s headquarters in Washington, DC, Fragola falsely stated: “I have just heard a rumor, and I am trying now to check its veracity, that the Falcon 9 experienced a double engine failure in the first stage and that the entire stage blew up just after the first stage separated. I also heard that this information was being held from NASA until SpaceX can ‘verify’ it.”
SpaceX for its part says that this rumour is “blatantly false… as a purported ‘expert’ in the industry, he should have known that the statements were false.”
