David Coppedge

The Jet Propulsion Laboratory at NASA fired him for performance reasons. Ars Technica's John Timmer has the story: Coppedge had worked on the Cassini mission to Saturn, starting as a contractor in 1996, and later becoming a full-time employee. But one of the projects he pursued on his own time was the promotion of intelligent design, the notion that the Universe and, most prominently, life itself, is too orderly to have come about without a designer. (Like many others in that movement, Coppedge is a self-identified evangelical Christian.)\ In 2009, he apparently got a bit aggressive about…