SpaceX employees have put their lives on the line to meet the aggressive pace of work that Chief Executive Elon Musk has demanded in pursuit of a Mars mission, according to a Reuters investigation.
The report documented over 600 previously undisclosed workplace injuries at SpaceX facilities since 2014, which Reuters said are only a part of the total number that is not publicly available.
Reuters examined injury logs and public records from the company’s six biggest facilities. SpaceX had not reported much of the injury data previously, in violation of regulatory standards. The investigation also included interviews with dozens of current and former SpaceX employees.
Among the injury data that Reuters gathered, over 100 workers experienced cuts or lacerations, 29 broke or dislocated bones, 17 had their hands and fingers crushed and nine had some form of serious head injury.
So, there’s some dishonesty (intentional? unintentional?) in the reporting by Reuters which is the source of this report
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/spacex-musk-safety/
I’m just going to take this from reddit as it’ll be easier than rewriting it all
Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) injury statistics for 2022: https://www.bls.gov/iif/nonfatal-injuries-and-illnesses-tables/table-1-injury-and-illness-rates-by-industry-2022-national.htm
The 0.8 injuries per 100 workers for “Guided missile and space vehicle manufacturing” category is very low when comparing to other manufacturing industries that is comparable to what SpaceX is doing:
Average of all private industries: 2.7
Fabricated metal product manufacturing: 3.7
Machinery manufacturing: 2.8
Motor vehicle manufacturing: 5.9
Motor vehicle body and trailer manufacturing: 5.8
Motor vehicle parts manufacturing: 3.1
Aircraft manufacturing: 2.5
Ship and boat building: 5.6
Overall I don’t see the numbers Reuters presented for 2022 (4.8 for Boca Chica, 1.8 for Hawthorne, 2.7 for McGregor) as abnormal at all, when compared to these other heavy manufacturing industries. I suspect the reason “Guided missile and space vehicle manufacturing” category reported such a low injury rate is because old space is not at all setup to be a high volume manufacturer as SpaceX is.
There’s obviously room for improvement and reporting, but mass producing stuff is going to cause more injuries as you see in other more similar areas.
ULA had the biggest rocket factories and completely both builds and launches a rocket every other month for decades now. And they aren’t anywhere close to SpaceX injury rates. The greed is the difference.
Musk has been reported going around factories demanding the removal of safety features and yelloy tape. At Tesla they had teams whose job was to set them up for inspections, then tear it down again because it “makes Elon upset to see so much yellow”. The cruelty is the point.
SpaceX is cranking satellites off an assembly line unlike anything we’ve ever seen (~5400 total), and building around 1 raptor engine a day.
They’ve built over 20 starships and almost 20 boosters.
The scale of what SpaceX is building is on a whole other level. There will be more accidents in a mass production environment like this.
They’ve done over 80 launches this year which involves rapidly doing more and more things. That’s dozens of booster recoveries and bringing them back and checking them out and repairing them etc.
I’m not saying the rushing hasn’t incurred higher accident rates, but it’s vastly different than launching 6 rockets a year, and the 0.8 average which includes building missles in a clean room.
The accident rate is comparable to things of this scale, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be better.
Edit: to further add - you can be upset that there are higher accidents due to rushing and that there is room to improve because of it, while also admitting and seeing that the comparison Reuters make is flawed and intentionally or not paints an even worse picture than it actually is. They aren’t mutually exclusive things.
Just musk shit.
Know your place, plebian trash! Work! Faster!
Srsly tho fuk that guy.
This is stupid. This is stupid like the cybertruck being made out of stainless steel resulting in a manufacturing cost that’s about 10x what the retail price was supposed to be because they have to be hand made and they’re still not ready for real life. This is renaming the brand that was by and large the only remaining valuable component of the company you paid $44B for because you fucked around and found out and then destroyed because you have no idea what you’re doing and you fired everyone who did.
Musk is a con man. That is his only gift. And it’s a gift that really comes from just winning the lottery. These people are injuring themselves for vaporware that’s going to do nothing but make Musk richer as he continues to eat that tasty government cheese and make tweets for a living.
Colonizing Mars during this century seems so braindead to me. There are lots of issues, such as:
-Lack of substantial life support resources- it would be difficult to make oxygen or water from the elements on Mars.
-High surface radiation levels mean structures need to be underground
-It takes a very long time to shuttle supplies between Earth and Mars, and it would be unfathomably expensive.
-The tendency for humans to lose their minds in isolation means we need to use robots, develop “hypersleep”, or build an elaborate and expensive base to keep humans entertained.
-The red planet is hostile to electronics. There are miles and miles of dust to clog up devices, and high wind speeds could damage above ground structures. Wind+dust=static, which is the arch nemesis of computer technology.
Let’s start with solving climate change, living on the moon, or mining asteroids and see how it goes.
You forgot radiation in between Earth and Mars. Even if we can address things planet side, there’s a long journey to cover. Also, extended periods in space leave bodies weak when they return to gravity; astronauts are carried out on cushions when they land, but there won’t be anyone to do that on Mars.
We definitely need to get moon operations down first.
