"I knew there were concerns about his conduct."
"Did you ask whether the conduct concern was being applied consistently?"
"No."
"Did you ask why the engineer raising the largest technical objection was being terminated before the objection was resolved?"
Giselle did not answer immediately.
"No."
That answer did more damage than denial would have.
The investigation found no email saying fire Isaac because his analysis threatens the contract.
Real organizations rarely produced villains considerate enough to document themselves that clearly.
Instead, the evidence showed incentives and decisions converging.
The schedule was late.
The customer milestone carried financial consequences.
Isaac's report threatened both.
Leadership categorized the unresolved analysis as exploratory, kept it out of the main risk register, used a selectively enforced security violation to terminate the engineer who refused certification, and proceeded with the accepted qualification profile.
Each step could be described in professional language.
Together they formed a system that rewarded removing the warning instead of resolving it.
Isaac's testimony lasted five hours across two days.
He was asked what he believed Cameron intended in 2017.
"I don't know."
"Do you believe he wanted the satellite to be unsafe?"
"No."
"Do you believe he knowingly ignored a risk?"
Isaac considered the wording.
"I believe he understood that I had identified a risk serious enough that I would not sign the certification. I believe he chose a path that removed my objection from the approval process without resolving the underlying technical question."
"Is that the same as knowingly launching unsafe hardware?"
"Not necessarily."
The attorney looked surprised.
Isaac continued.
"People do not have to believe a failure will happen to behave irresponsibly toward evidence that says it might."
The room went still.
That sentence appeared almost unchanged in the final restricted report.
The investigation also examined Nexora's current software proposal.
Here again, the truth was less dramatic than the first impression.
Several Nexora engineers had recognized the reserve penalty. They believed the trade might still be acceptable under an earlier mission-lifetime assumption. Their error was not hiding a known fatal flaw. It was allowing an optimistic implementation timeline and an incomplete reserve model to remain attached to a proposal after the operational margin had begun shrinking.
Cameron had been told about the tradeoff.
His mistake was presenting the package to the oversight board as a conservative solution without making the reserve uncertainty prominent enough.
That distinction mattered because accuracy demanded it.
Isaac did not want Cameron punished for things he had not done.
He wanted him held accountable for what he had.
Three weeks after the audit began, Cameron resigned from his NASA consulting arrangement.
The public explanation was brief: he intended to pursue other opportunities and spend more time on private advisory work.
Inside the restricted program community, the meaning was understood.
His access was withdrawn. He would not return to technical advisory authority on government flight programs without a separate review.
Nexora's consequences came more slowly.
The company was not banned overnight. Contracts were not theatrically canceled. Thousands of employees who had nothing to do with the 2017 decisions still worked there, and the government still depended on hardware and support already under contract.
Instead, procurement officials increased oversight, required independent verification on several open programs, and placed Nexora's management controls under enhanced review.
When the next major propulsion competition was evaluated, Nexora remained eligible.
Its proposal lost.
The evaluation cited technical-management risk, incomplete lessons-learned integration, and weakness in independent dissent handling.
No newspaper headline announced punishment.
In aerospace, losing trust often looked like not being chosen the next time.
Giselle Hartmann remained chief executive through the end of the audit.
Then Nexora's board announced she would step down at the end of the fiscal quarter.
The company described it as a planned leadership transition.