Destruction of $700m property due to negligence certainly seems jailworthy to me. At the very least, this company should be paying a fine which actually recovers the damages.
edit: Real question, though. I'm often called to report for jury duty but have yet to actually sit on a jury. My understanding is the jury is explicitly charged to reach a "guilty of accusation" or "not guilty" decision. And sentencing is a whole separate phase of the trial in which the jury is not involved. I'm sure this varies with types of charges and with locale, but... am I missing something about how you were asked as a juror to consider that sentence?
It was probably asked during the "voir dire" phase; that's where if you actually perform jury duty and have to go down to the court, your group might be called in to sit for "voir dire", where the lawyers for each side (prosecution and defendant) ask each potential jury member certain questions regarding the case.
The questions are meant to allow the lawyers to pick from the group a pool of jurors - those that make it through voir dire perform the actual jury duty of being the jury. Those who don't, go home.
And if you ever want to never serve on a jury, or never be called again for jury duty, mention that you support FIJA or the concept of a "fully informed jury".
It's like a poison pill for ever serving on a jury again, but usually, if you are anything like a software engineer or similar (which they do ask your profession in voir dire), they will generally skip you (they really, really don't want anyone with that kind of mindset of extreme logic, reasoning, rationality, process flow, etc).
But if you mention FIJA - there's a chance they'll not only let you go, plus strike you from the "call list" - but that any other potential juror in the room will get the same treatment.
FIJA is not against the law. It's your right as a citizen to understand and be "fully informed", but the courts (or our justice system) have made it so that most people aren't (for instance, most people don't know or understand anything about "jury nullification", and the system plays to this ignorance). They will say such things prior to the jury leaving to decide the case that the jury can only consider the "guilty or not guilty" according to the law, etc - which is a complete lie. A juror or jury can decide "not guilty" even if it is clear that the law was broken, if they feel the law is unjust. But they don't want you to know that you can do that as a juror or jury. So they don't "fully inform" you of that option.
If you really want to get them into a tizzy, print out 500 business cards with the FIJA info on them, and put them on cars in the parking lots around the courthouse...note that you might need a permit for this, or they might have made it "illegal" to do this to cars around a courthouse (it might be considered jury tampering or something - amazing that by informing people of their rights as a juror and citizen, that would be considered "tampering"...), so understand that, too.
At one point, they asked if we would be able to consider the full range of punishment during sentencing. Naturally, we asked what that range was, and both lawyers and the judge all had to confer to decide whether or not we were allowed to know. (Apparently that question was new to them. Weird.) They finally decided we were allowed to know, and the answer was up to 20 years in prison. At that point I stated that I could not possibly consider 20 years in prison for the crime of receiving stolen property. I was subsequently cut from the jury, probably because of that, although of course they didn't say why.
Incidentally, one of the guys who had important classified stuff going on at work that would pose a big problem if the trial ran long ended up serving on the jury. I hope for his sake that it didn't actually run long.
You also have to consider what your motivation behind punishment is; is it re-education? Is it compensation of damages? Or is it to just completely bankrupt the company because Never Again? I mean in that last case, NASA and the US as a whole may find itself at a disadvantage in the aluminum industry.
Edit: on second thought, these often are considered for individuals, as long as they’re sufficiently sympathetic/rich. See for example Brock Turner. I should say, funny how these are often not considered for individuals, depending on who they are.
The company caused 700M damage to the US tax payers (assuming the proof part), they should be on the hook to repay that, if they can't they should go bankrupt like anyone else who owes more money than they have.