A former SpaceX security manager, who was privy to top secret information on U.S. government programs, is suing the company and one of its senior employees for alleged discrimination, sexual harassment, and retaliation. 

Jenna Shumway, who was promoted to Senior Contractor Program Security Officer after being hired in 2022, also alleges the senior employee — Daniel Collins, a former Defense Department official hired to run security compliance for the company’s government work — violated top secret protocols and then concealed this information from the government. 

Lawyers for Shumway, Collins, and SpaceX did not immediately respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment. 

Collins made the news in December 2024 when The New York Times reported SpaceX was under federal review for sloppy security protocols. Collins discouraged reporting security clearance violations and allowed executives without proper clearances into classified meetings, according to the NYT. This and other allegations triggered at least three federal reviews of the company’s security procedures, the NYT found. 

According to Shumway’s complaint, she was passed over for the director position that Collins ultimately was hired to without being given the opportunity to apply for it. Her “work environment entirely changed” when Collins was hired as her superior in spring 2024, according to the complaint. Shumway claims Collins effectively waged a campaign of harassment against her, which included stripping her of her responsibilities over a period of months and ultimately leading to her termination in October 2024.

Collins’ harassment extended to other female employees too, the complaint alleges. The discrimination included preventing female staff from doing required security work, allegedly setting them up for non-compliance, staring at one employee’s chest during a meeting, and asking a subordinate female employee if she wanted to “get shitty together” over after-work drinks. 

Shumway and other female employees repeatedly reported Collins to SpaceX Human Resources, the lawsuit states. The company ignored these complaints, the suit alleges, and didn’t take any action beyond suggesting the employees avoid being alone with Collins. Shumway is seeking unspecified damages.

This is not the first time SpaceX has been sued over claims that it enables sexual discrimination. Previous lawsuits have alleged similar stories of bias against female employees and a hostile work environment that enabled gender-based harassment. The company is also battling investigations from the California Civil Rights Department and the National Labor Relations Board over similar claims. 

The lawsuit was filed in late May in the Los Angeles County Superior Court; it was later moved to federal court on June 30 at SpaceX’s request. It is filed in the federal Central District of California court under case number 2:22-cv-05959.

Legacy aerospace giants scored a win Tuesday when the U.S. Senate passed President Trump’s budget reconciliation bill that earmarks billions more for NASA’s flagship Artemis program. 

The $10 billion addition to the Artemis architecture, which includes funding for additional Space Launch System rockets and an orbiting station around the moon called Gateway, is a rebuke to critics who wished to see alternative technologies used instead. Among those critics are SpaceX CEO Elon Musk and billionaire entrepreneur Jared Isaacman, who Musk proposed as the next NASA administrator. 

There’s no sign the souring relations between Musk and Trump are recovering. If Trump signs the bill, the fallout, which began after the president’s abrupt revocation of Isaacman’s nomination, will likely continue — if not escalate.

Musk in particular has taken aim at the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket on the grounds that it is fully expendable. Unlike SpaceX’s family of rockets, which are all designed to be reusable, SLS is one-time use only. As Musk put it back in 2020, that means “a billion dollar rocket is blown up” every time it is launched. Even that may have been an understatement; more recent figures from NASA’s watchdog put recurring production costs closer to $2.5 billion each.

A total of around $24 billion has been poured into SLS production to date, funds that have primarily gone to a consortium of aerospace primes, including Boeing, L3Harris’ Aerojet Rocketdyne, and Northrop Grumman, which leads construction of the major rocket components. 

During his recent confirmation hearings with the Senate, Isaacman questioned the massive sums. He affirmed using SLS for the next two Artemis missions, but ultimately said he didn’t think the rocket was “the long‑term way to get to and from the moon and to Mars with great frequency.”

Congress — and Trump, if he decides to sign the bill into law — have decided to press ahead. Around $4.1 billion of the $10 billion total added to the document will go toward additional SLS rockets for Artemis missions 4 and 5. Meanwhile, around $2.6 billion will go toward completion of the Gateway station.

Notably, the president’s fiscal year budget request for NASA submitted in May proposed to “phase out the Space Launch System and Orion spacecraft after the Artemis III mission is complete.” This new funding flies in the face of that proposal, which was submitted before Musk and Trump’s public fallout in June. 

The new funding includes $700 million for a new Mars Telecommunications Orbiter, $1.25 billion for additional operation of the International Space Station, and $325 million to SpaceX for the development of a spacecraft to de-orbit the ISS at the end of the decade. (The total award for that de-orbit spacecraft is $843 million.)  

U.S. senators voted overwhelmingly on Tuesday to remove a controversial 10-year ban on states’ abilities to regulate AI from the Trump administration’s “Big Beautiful Bill,” reports Axios.

The provision to the reconciliation bill was introduced by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX). Many prominent Silicon Valley executives — including OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Anduril’s Palmer Luckey, and a16z’s Marc Andreessen — were in favor of the so-called “AI moratorium,” which they said would prevent states from forming an unworkable patchwork of regulation that could stifle AI innovation.

Opposition to the provision became a bipartisan issue, as most Democrats and many Republicans warned that the ban on state regulation would harm consumers, and let powerful AI companies operate with little oversight. Critics also objected to Cruz’s plan to tie compliance with federal broadband funding.

After going back and forth over the provision, Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) on Monday offered an amendment to strip the provision alongside Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-WA). 

Blackburn originally opposed the provision, but came to an agreement with Cruz over the weekend that shortened the proposed ban from ten years to five. Blackburn then pulled her support for the provision entirely on Monday.

The Senate voted 99-1 to strip the AI moratorium.