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.

The report seems to indicate the driver wasn’t wearing a seatbelt, or the belt design failed, when the Tesla suddenly veered off a road into a tree and he was thrown to his death.

San Diego Police Department officers were called Thursday at 5:40 p.m. to the 10400 block of Scripps Poway Parkway where they learned after the victim failed to maneuver around the bend in the parkway, the Tesla crashed into the roadway’s center island and continued onto the island, striking multiple trees.

The driver was ejected and died at the scene, said Officer Robert Heims.

Not much of a bend to “maneuver” here.

Once again police find a “veered” Tesla crashed into trees, instead of into oncoming traffic. And yet again the Tesla trees and seatbelts question comes up.

Update: Video from a following car shows Tesla’s hallmark sudden dangerous acceleration, drift right and then a sudden left veer into a tree. It does not appear related to a notable bend in the road, as was reported.

See comment below.

Allegedly the following analysis comes from U.S. embassy officials:

Right-wing populists such as Orbán and Netanyahu thrive on posturing against outside antagonists, using external criticism to bolster their bona fides as strongmen who can stand up to the international community.

[…]

Whenever Western countries would publicly pressure Orbán on his policies, he would refashion that pressure into electoral support, leaving his critics with no good options. Stay silent and he would win; speak up and he would also win.

The proposed solution is to move the messaging from outside public pressure to inside, driving wedges in domestic coalition groups to expose inherently extreme groups as oppositional and destructive to coalitions.

In practice, this means strategically targeting policies where Netanyahu is on the wrong side of Israeli public opinion and forcing him to choose between his hard-right partners and the rest of the country.

Publicly being a supporter of what the rest of the country wants to do can put an extremist in relief; sets them on a political island that makes any attempted power grabs and control issues far more easily judged as coming from the island.

Excellent analysis here:

…most Israelis have no desire to mortgage the security of Israel and its indispensable relationship to the United States in favor of some far-flung hilltop settlers in West Bank regions that few Israelis could locate on a map.

That identification of extremists as being apart from the middle is translated into a simple control language: posturing against inside antagonists means hold accountable those who commit extreme acts such as hate-based attacks.

And that is also known as defending representative law and order, using a basic harm principle, which U.S. embassy officials seem to have presented as the kind of domestic coalition that can unseat right-wing populists.