Engineers who work Elon Musk's Spacex has been brought as senior advisers to the acting administrator of Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), resources say in wired.
On Sunday, Sean Duffy, Secretary of the Department of Transportation (DOT), who oversees the FAA, announced In an X post that Spacex engineers will visit the Air Traffic Control System Command Center in Virginia to take what he positioned as a tour. “The safety of the wind travel is something that is not partisan,” Musk Answer. “Spacex engineers will help make the air travel safer.”
By the time these posts were made, though, according to resources given unknown because they were afraid of retaliation, Spacex engineers were to be -beding the agency under schedule A, a Special authority It allows government managers to “hire people with disabilities without asking them to compete for work,” According to at the Office of Personnel Management (OPM).
New hires come after the ends of the road -The FAA probation employees, and the most deadly month of us Flying catastrophic In more than a decade.
According to a knowledgeable resource, none of the Spacex engineers have been fully -vetted on their start date. Not like Very young technologists In connection with the so-called Government Department of Government (DOGE) which has been given access to critical systems to agencies covering From OPM In Department of Treasury In National oceanic and atmospheric administration In recent weeks, however, engineers identified by Wired -Sed Malaska, Thomas Kiernan, Sam Smeal, and Brady Glantz – seemed to have a FAA -related experience.
Malaska is currently, according to his LinkedIn, a senior director of application software in Spacex, where he started working in May 2021. Former senior director of data engineering at Capitol One and a senior architect in Finra, he graduated from the University of Maryland Baltimore County in 2000 and Cowrote a 2015 book In the Hadoop application architecture.
Kiernan is currently a lead software engineer in Spacex, according to his LinkedIn. Before joining Spacex in May 2020, he worked at Wayfair, and a 2017 Dartmouth graduate.
SMEAL has been a software engineer who has worked in Spacex since September 2021, according to its LinkedIn. He graduated from Saint Vincent College in 2018.
Glantz was a software engineer who worked in Spacex from May 2024 and worked as an engineering analyst at Goldman Sachs from 2019 to 2021, according to his LinkedIn, and graduated from the University of Michigan in 2019.
Malaska, Kiernan, Smeal, and Glantz did not immediately respond to requests for comment. The FAA also did not respond immediately to the requests for the comment.
In His post on xDuffy said, “Since I know that the media (and Hillary Clinton) will claim Elon's team gets special access to, let's clearly @faaanews regularly provide tours at the command center at both media and company. “
