An Accident at SpaceX
semafor.com
semafor.com
Is there any actual statistics that support that claim? The article says that at least 24 workers have been killed while in the space industry since 1980. Compare that to coal fatalities, of which there were nearly 2,000 fatalities over the same period.
SpaceX has 12,000 people and are making rockets so it seems like some degree of danger will be inherent. Of course this should be reduced where-ever possible, but if the claim is that the space industry is unnecessarily unsafe then I'm not sure that's convincing.
The claim is that it's necessarily unsafe. You even quoted that part.
So he's implying that if they weren't so focused on speed and competitive pressure it could be more safe. There's where I get "unnecessarily unsafe" from, because in the author's perspective it's not necessary to prioritize speed and competition over safety. My point is that I don't think it's obviously unsafe at all, or at least could use some statistics to support his argument that it is.
That's not to say that improvements can't be made. The real question is how many of the injuries and deaths were preventable by following the guidelines that already exist, and are generally followed but not perfectly followed.
This is why I don't think the argument that development is too fast holds water.
On the other hand, if the company were flagrantly ignoring safety standards in their process, yes, it would slow it down.
I agree with the author that it shouldn't be necessary to prioritize speed and competition over safety. The whole "will we get to X before country Y does" is IMO childish, dick-measuring nonsense, especially if getting there faster means more people have to die... because in the grand scheme of things, it doesn't matter all that much if humans "get to X" this year or next year or 5 years from now.
At the within-one-country level, you can eliminate concerns about one company out-competing another (via unsafe practices) with regulation. Globally, sure, you can't mandate that another country slows down in order to be more safe, but I think the downsides of allowing another country to get there faster are overblown.
If we look back at the US-Soviet space race during the Cold War, it doesn't seem all that clear to me that the US benefited all that much from being first to land on the moon. Consider that the Soviets won the first milestone in that race, and that many people don't even know that or have forgotten. And consider that, post-moon-landing, the space race was essentially over, and both the US and Soviets went on to focus more on military/intelligence and commercial applications for the ability to get things into Earth's orbit, and stay there. Sure, there were more moon landings after the first one, but I think while most people know who Neil Armstrong is, they couldn't name any of the people who landed on the moon in later missions. Hell, most people don't even remember that Collins flew with Armstrong, and I imagine there are quite a few who don't remember Aldrin landing as well on that trip. (How many people would actually recognize the name Gene Cernan, the last human's feet to touch the moon's surface? I hadn't heard of him until I just looked it up.)
Yes, you can make the argument that the US got some big-time global bragging rights for making it first, and that certainly conferred some economic benefits, but I would argue that the US's economic prosperity after that point, as well as the Soviets' eventual decline, was pretty much baked in at that point, and would have happened regardless of what happened with the space race.
So this is just a long-winded way for me to say that I don't think "getting there first" matters all that much, and that we should slow down and make sure all of this is safer. Sure, we're never going to eliminate all risk, and sending humans into space will number among the riskiest things we do for quite a while into the future, but there are levels of safety and unsafety that we should and shouldn't accept.
That actually sounds like a mature and potentially safe industry.
Consider that there have been about 9 or 10 worker fatalities due to the Shuttle program (not counting the astronauts) in 135 flights of Shuttle vs zero SpaceX fatalities in nearly 200 Falcon launches, and I think it’s clear that finger wagging about private space “going too fast” is missing the mark. It’s actually possible that the slow practices of traditional contractors contributed to some of these deaths whereas the modern automation-driven SpaceX approach has limited fatalities.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spaceflight-related_ac...
Exactly.
I like to dump on Musk, but people disobey safety regulations all the time, and sometimes it bites them:
"Three Dead After Falling Into Molten Steel Pit" https://apnews.com/3c42c98020afcd458f1f49a861d0d87b
In this instance, the main culprit was the fact that they didn't dry out the mold properly which then cracked and leaked molten steel everywhere. However, people were not supposed to be standing on top of the cover plates during centrifugal caster operation.
There is a reason why you obey the safety regulations every single time.
"speed and competitive pressure in the private space race make workplaces necessarily unsafe"
I took that as meaning "private space companies are moving too fast and cutting too many corners to keep their workplaces safe". Meaning the "necessarily" part is only because companies are choosing this speed (or, similarly, being forced to move at this speed because other companies are also moving too fast/cutting corners).
In other words, I think the author's intent is more damning than you are implying.
Not to say the article is correct about this, of course.
Do you though? I mean, again this article only cites three, and if that's all there were that seems to me to be a very reasonable accident rate in heavy industrial environments. People get crushed by backhoes almost every week just digging foundations and paving roads!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spaceflight-related_ac...
If the US accident rate is similar (let's be generous - I suspect it's worse) then a rough back-of-an-envelope calculation puts that at 8000 deaths per year, and *you don't even hear about that*.
There's a history, at least in the US, of production rate correlating to fatality rate in certain hazardous industries. That said, one of the most famous steel CEOs (Paul O’Neill at Alcoa) put safety at the forefront and transformed the company and their production [2].
1: citation needed
2: https://www.forbes.com/sites/roddwagner/2019/01/22/have-we-l...
https://youtu.be/ZNAHcMMOHE8?t=395 : A trip to the moon 1901
But seriously, the point is that the techniques and facilities are not changing, which is blatantly not true of reusable meth-ox rockets. Or you can just say we'll stick to Saturn Vs to get to space.
I recently read RAILWAY ADVENTURES AND ANECDOTES (1885) <https://www.gutenberg.org/files/31395/31395-h/31395-h.htm>, a collection of interesting moments from the first 50 years of railroads. Almost every page there is a mention of some fatal accident for passengers and crews (usually a boiler explosion, and/or a derailment), yet everyone seems very matter-of-fact about such things despite (or, rather, because of) their frequency.
Perhaps SpaceX should move somewhat more slowly and focus more on safety, but I hope that people keep in mind that the only way to be perfectly safe is to do nothing with any risk, which in this case translates to making no real progress on rocketry. That comes with species-level risks.
And if you double the amount of stuff done for each iteration, it might increase production time by much more than double, or potentially make some of the more difficult things impossible, as focus and momentum is lost, and mental state decays more between iterations.
https://www.osha.gov/pls/imis/accidentsearch.search?acc_keyw...
Osha incident report for this incident:
https://www.osha.gov/pls/imis/establishment.inspection_detai...
Non-competitive US Government incompetence killed 14 astronauts since 1980.
System and safety design- a topic that a rocketry company should be deeply familiar with- should lead us to solutions where bad things are exceedingly impossible. Where you have to be trying to cause an accident for it to happen. This should extend beyond the product being built itself, to the factory, to the R&D, to every part of the organization where danger exists.
And when failure occurs, it behooves you to shout from the rooftop that you messed up, and show the world how you're making changes so it can't happen again. Being quiet about the failure of your system makes it sound a lot like you aren't planning to make any changes to it.
It's a bad culture to start in a rocketry company.
Nobody would ever design a ladder that cannot be climbed without a safety harness being properly worn, but many people are injured or killed in ladder accidents at workplaces every year. In your world that's a design failure, but out here in reality it's often carelessness or sheer bad luck.
Doesn’t it seem reasonable to you to design and engineer cherry pickers such that the bucket can’t be moved unless a safety harness is attached?
No - that seems unreasonable too, as there's no reasonable way for the cherry picker to know if the harness is being worn by anyone, so it's just safety theater.
Merely because some accidents still happen despite motivated and brilliant people working to prevent them does not mean that the effort should not be made.
You don't abandon the endeavor, but nor do you just throw caution to the winds.
The article had a great example of a competing space company with an evidently solid safety culture; an accident was reported, and inspection done, and zero issues were found (which is quite difficult to be good enough have an OSHA inspection find nothing of note)
>> Relativity has a strong safety record relative to others in the industry, with just one OSHA safety inspection since it was founded in 2015. The inspection, spurred by an accident, did not result in a violation.
That's all well and good, but you also can't demonize an entire culture based on unrealistic navel-gazing. It's entirely possible this was a process or design problem that could have been prevented, but it's also possible that it's not - pretending you know based on few details in a one-sided article is pretty silly.
No. It is not. There is one telling detail in the article. SpaceX was fined by OSHA. That pretty much means in itself that there were things SpaceX shoulf have done which they didn’t.
We can’t and won’t do each our own investigation. Nobody believes that the article has enough details to decide the case on its merrits. But we know that someone professional did the investigation and found the company violated the safety norms. That is what we have these agencies for.
Though the article says "highest penalty level," according to OSHA's website had the violation been "Willful or Repeated" it would have resulted in up to a $145k fine[1].
We don't know what for, or if the fined offense would have prevented this accident.
This, I expect, is exactly the kind of bad cultural attitude that @mabbo was referring to. You're advocating for accidents as being an unavoidable cost of business while preemptively hand-waving them as being the fault of careless employees or fate.
As @P5fRxh5kUvp2th points out, there are established industry safety measures to avoid exactly these kinds of accidents when working around dangerous machinery, in the lockout/tagout system.
If tests are locked out while employees are tagged into an area, you can't accidentally smack them into a coma with an over-pressurized part blowing out. By requiring tag ins to access dangerous areas, you don't have to have employees remember someone is out there, or that a test is coming, or worry about anyone getting confused on either front.
Blaming the employee for being where they shouldn't be or the other for running tests when someone was nearby is a cop out. It shouldn't even be possible for it to happen at all.
Design your systems and processes to expect that humans are fallible.
This needs seconding. It's ridiculous to say that we can't demonize an entire company of 12,000 people, and in the same breath, turn around to demonize the line workers of that company.
It's no less ridiculous to instead demonize the line workers that got hurt, which seems to be both post-facto cherrypicking, and victim blaming.
I guarantee you that every job site manager in the WORLD can identify the unsafe employees, even if they're doing 'everything by the book'.
Some of it can be designed away (two-hand tools for example) but some of it is basically inherent.
An infinitely better course of action is to ban all known-unsafe employees from operating in the risky path. Workers who unnecessarily put themselves and everyone else in jeopardy have no business being in the path.
With that said, I'm highly skeptical about the veracity of this claim. Human behavior is fundamentally unstable, oscillating in the continuity spectrum between stable and erratic. However, the amount of variability for a given individual tends to be stable, which may be what you are saying a good and effective manager should be able to catch.
Regardless, humans are wetware and fundamentally error prone. Best to account for this element of our nature in the larger system design.
absolutely.
lockout/tagout may seem unnecessary, but it's specifically to avoid exactly these types of situations. Not is it not possible for someone to be in an unsafe place, it's not possible for miscommunications such that it BECOMES unsafe after the fact because that lockout is with a lock no one else can unlock except the person who did it.
It obviously requires humans actually DO the procedures, but I think that's part of the point with the question.
And despite many comments in this discussion thread asserting that safety reduces progress and speed, lockout/tagout and similar procedures reduce the number of accidents and mishaps. That leads to less downtime spent picking up the body parts or cleaning a corpse out of the equipment. This is one of those "slow is smooth, smooth is fast" things. Get into a good routine with good safety measures and you can get shit done instead of cleaning up shit.
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ieRwRS0VUUM
For example: Humans improve their visual perception by lightly shifting their heads to avoid reflections, gauge shadows and mitigate obstructions. If the tech can't follow, you have an inferior solution. A solution where bubbles will be missed. Just staring at a screen is not the same. Even if you can tilt the camera.
The tag-out system could, for example, use a pressure relief valve. I suspect they even have one already when running the test, but if someone was in the wrong space when the relief valve wasn't in place then I assume they're not using it as a tag point.
Here's a fatality from just last year during tunnel construction for a maglev line: https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2021/10/29/national/jr-tun...
Thank you! I was trying desperately to remember what that system is called but deleted that sentence from my reply because I had forgotten it!
> In the accident involving Cabada, OSHA’s accident investigation summary noted that “the final step in the pressure check operation, venting, was done for the first time using an automated program as opposed to the normal manual method that had been used in previous operations.”
https://www.osha.gov/pls/imis/establishment.inspection_detai...
It sounds like a number of things went wrong:
1) The automated program malfunctioned.
2) The controller cover welds failed.
3) The employee was too close.
And self flagellation after an accident does nothing to improve safety. Worse, it feels like you're doing something when you're not. Further, doing so right away leads to kneejerk reactions which might feel like an improvement but which are poorly suited for actually addressing the problem. The proper approach is to methodically investigate the issue, figure out what went wrong, and make appropriate, actionable changes. There is absolutely no reason to make a public announcement at any point in the process - safety is not a PR tactic.
Any potentially unsafe location should be behind a LOTO / safety interlock, and you should not be able to access it without locking it.
You’re not even going to pretend being honest about this uh?
> An interlock prevents people from being in a place they aren't supposed to be, it does nothing for when something goes wrong in a place you are supposed to be.
What sort of nonsense is that? The point of an interlock is to keep the place where you’re supposed to be safe for as long as you’re there. And stop you from being there if it’s unsafe.
> there's always something else that can go wrong.
Yeah sure a volcano could explode from below your desk. Whatever.
It seems you're the one not even pretending to be honest here.
Obviously we are talking here about the sort of potentially dangerous work where there are serious risks to begin with.
> The point of an interlock is to keep the place where you’re supposed to be safe for as long as you’re there. And stop you from being there if it’s unsafe.
How would an interlock keep the place you are supposed to be safe? An interlock just stops something from running when its activated. When you shut down something to go inside for maintenance or whatever, an interlock stops someone from accidentally turning it on while you're inside. But when you're not inside and something is supposed to be running, the interlock is not going to do anything to contain a mechanical failure.
Imagine someone photographing sharks. They're in a shark cage to protect them. Compared to outside of the cage, they are relatively safe. An interlock might ensure that they are indeed inside the cage before a bucket of chum is dumped to attract sharks. But an interlock does nothing to protect them from a failure of the cage - maybe due to poor maintenance part of it rusted, or perhaps there was a defect with some of the welding to begin with - as far as anyone is aware, the photographers are in a "safe" place but really they're not.
I’m not even sure if you are asking this seriously. You make a safety assesment. People who do this kind of engineering task go through the systems methodically and they write up the dangers, hazards and the mitigations.
This is not some kind of new unheard of physics. This is not Gordon Freeman pushing an unusual crystal into an anti-mass spectrometer which results in headcrabs eating everyone who doesn’t have a crowbar. High pressure systems, cryogenics, flamable gasses and liquids all have known hazards and with proper systems and procedures they all can be mitigated.
> Cabada should have been perfectly safe where they were, but at least one safety system failed.
I’m working from a very limited set of information but the article states he should not have been where he was during a test. If that is true we have processes to mitigate that risk. (Lockout-tagout) That is pretty standard really.
> The proper approach is to methodically investigate the issue, figure out what went wrong, and make appropriate, actionable changes.
I agree with that.
> There is absolutely no reason to make a public announcement at any point in the process - safety is not a PR tactic.
Sure. But not talking about incidents is a PR tactic. Asking the grieving family to remove a picture of the hurt worker which depicts him in context of his work is a PR tactic.
There is a fundamental difference between "we have assessed the risk and here it is below some threshold where we are confident that no further safety measures are required" and "this place is safe, no accidents can happen here."
> Cabada, a ten-year veteran at the company, shouldn’t have been near the valve when it hit maximum pressure, according to people with knowledge of the accident, *but it ramped up faster than expected, blowing a shield off the valve* and knocking him unconscious.
A lockout would have done nothing. The test didn't start early, the test went wrong, and a place that was supposed to be safe at the time suddenly wasn't. The fact a safety shield blew off means they recognized that they went through the effort of identifying potential safety issues and implementing safeguards, but those safeguards were inadequate.
> Asking the grieving family to remove a picture of the hurt worker which depicts him in context of his work is a PR tactic.
The article doesn't say that the picture change was requested by spacex, only that it occured after the start of the family's legal proceedings against the company.
> But not talking about incidents is a PR tactic.
I mean in the sense that anything can influence public opinion, sure. But obviously what I am saying is that you're not supposed to take safety measures to improve your image in the public sphere, you take safety measures to ensure the wellbeing of your employees. A company that is serious about safety, instead of PR, will do what is effective (ie collecting evidence and making an informed, rational decision) instead of what is popular (doing something for the sake of being seen doing something which seems sensible to a person unfamiliar with the situation - like a lockout).
But that is not what was asked in the comment. What was asked is how you know if something is unsafe.
> A lockout would have done nothing.
You state that very confidently. Do you have insider information you are privy to?
Computers controling valves can go bad. Valves can stuck open or closed. Open wider than they were meant to. Open faster than they meant to. You take a diagram of the aparatus and go through all the possible way a valve can misbehave on all possible computer controlled valves and ask: “what would be the consequence of that?” You realise that there is a possibility that a system in question goes rapidly to a high pressure state. You then ask what harm that might cause? You realise that it might blow parts of. Or at least you are not confident that it can’t. So you ask an engineer what is their mitigation for that. If they say “oh we just know it is dangerous, we would never stand by the pipes when the test is running” then you ask them to employ a lockout system.
Look. I don’t know anything more about the test they were running than what is written in the article. You are assuming that he was in a safe place, but suddenly it was not a safe place anymore. How does that happen in your opinion? Did the pressure just suddenly teleport in? It is a ton of work to validate control software. Much easier to just stand in a place where even if the controls go haywire you will be okay.
I’m reading the same sentence differently from you. To me it means that he shouldn’t have been there during a test. (And also the test shouldn’t have blown up the valve.)
Am I reading this right? One of the two safety violations was rated the maximum gravity of 10, yet could not have had a penalty of more than $18,475? That is not even couch money for a company the size of SpaceX. I really hope I'm missing some critical piece of info which makes this all make sense. Someone please assuage my concerns here.
Willful or Repeated violations cost 10x more. And failing to fix something costs 14k per day.
Source: https://www.osha.gov/penalties
Globally, protections for blue collar workers are crap. The US actually has pretty good worker protections all things considered (like, even compared to Europe).
This seems fair-ish to me. Accidents happen, and we want to disincentivize them, but we want to disincentivize negligence even more. To make monetary disincentives effective, I would argue that it'd be better to assess penalties as a % of profit rather than as a flat fee, so big companies pay more than small companies. But we have the same issue with traffic citations. Someone rich pays the same speeding fee as someone poor, so it's not as effective as a disincentive.
More importantly, we should keep in mind that it's not like OSHA violations are the only possible monetary compensation. For example, SpaceX may be liable for a civil lawsuit from the victim or his family.
On the day when that rule goes into effect, Wall Street's lawyers & financial engineers will have already shuffled all the even-slightly-risky jobs into a maze of little break-even subcontractors, shell companies, and subsidiaries.
Serious or even willful OSHA penalties on the scale of $7,000 or $70,000 are pretty insignificant to a large-scale operation. However, OSHA citations, used as evidence of negligence in a lawsuit, are enormously significant.
That's why when OSHA gets involved at a jobsite, smart companies choose to immediately shut down the work in question until an outside contractor can verify that the flaw has been corrected. The OSHA inspector can be tasked with interviewing employees and getting court orders so that the courts can eventually shut down a facility, but you never, ever want it to go that far.
Thank you, chroma.
> "Sometimes things just suck"
I don't want this to sound like normalizing a safety deficit. It's not OK. But the incident happened and that sucks. OSHA can't immediately fix things and that sucks. Punitive damages don't immediately fix things and that sucks; they add some motivation, but they don't directly fix anything.
OSHA isn't a punitive organization. That said, OSHA violations frequently convert into civil damages. This seems fairer than the government getting a check.
Also, OSHA violations aren't restricted to safety incidents. Once an incident occurs, OSHA can go back and assess fines for each violation that didn't result in an injury.
Yeah sure, let's called Relativity safe while totally ignoring the fact that they have a team of 700 (compared to 12,000 at SpaceX), spent bulk of the last seven years working on 3D printing rocket parts taking VC money (unlike SpaceX, which rose to the leading and in some cases only launch provider in US), and never launched a rocket as of today.
Oh and Relativity still had one OSHA inspection, where as SpaceX had a total of 5 health and safety violations since 2014.
Perhaps the author needs to calibrate his mental picture of safety before calling Relativity relatively safe.
And it hit the top of the front page—not bad for a first impression.
The FT has a good background bit, also just released today. Paywall: <https://archive.ph/GkSjG>
https://www.bls.gov/charts/census-of-fatal-occupational-inju...
There's the absolute number of events to consider, plus the overall rate of injury to consider, the latter being more of a risk estimate. Here are the top three by a fair margin (first number is total deaths, second is rate is per 100,000 full time employees in that sector, for the year 2020):
Construction: 1,008 10.2
Transportation and warehousing 805 13.4
Agriculture, forestry, fishing, and hunting 511 21.5
I don't see any breakdown in that data for the space industry, but that's the kind of information that would put this report in some kind of context.
There are ideally engineering controls and standard operating procedures or documented deviations, even in research or pilot facilities. Construction and agriculture, apart from the design phase (like residential crafts, HVAC, industrial electricians or cement etc) do not have the same workplace standards as an industrial facility or field site with cohabitation of engineering, operations, and contractors. There are always exceptions with safe contractors and bad facilities.
If you are routinely testing a pressure relief valve and there is not a documented procedure around this or a permit addressing limiting exposure to that energy that might be a problem in retrospect. Ideally, industries would operate in good faith of regulations and not just outside the envelope of punitive measures. But regulatory stuff is complicated and specific depending on location. I simply wanted to point out it would be helpful to compare incident statistics against common risk profile industries.
"SpaceX has made no announcement to the public or to its workers about his status"
HIPAA and other legal compliance?
The point is, most companies don't release this information and I believe there are legal reasons for that.
Why would a company highlight failures if they don't have to? Especially when their statements can later be used against them in civil or criminal proceedings.
I thought the difference was clear
They aren't following some well tested process that is well understood.
They're trying new things that might go wrong in unexpected ways. Yet somehow their accident rates are still low. That's pretty impressive.
I really see this as part of the natural cycle of any org. Nimble companies grow, incidents happen, corruption happens, safeguards are put in place to prevent issues from recurring and before you know it, the company is no longer nimble.
can you devise a safeguard for this incident which wouldn't negatively impact both of these concepts?
Move fast and break things was a terrible mantra but it seems to have seeped in...or perhaps was always there.
Profit motive is like gravity - it's always there, in every society. It may have other names, like making your superior happy, but it's there.
You have to guard against profit motive weakening your core values - you have to put up guard rails. If those guard rails are missing, that's very bad. If those guard rails are there, and people avoiding them is normalized, that's very bad. If those guard rails are there, and people get in trouble for avoiding them, that's very bad.
If those guard rails are there, and you have a comprehensive process for reviewing incidents and updating rules and processes based on real world factors, then you're part of the way towards good safety culture.
Safety culture is the decisions that individual team members and teams make. Safety culture is also the corporate process for evaluating incidents. And also the way that resources are or are not assigned when concerns are raised. And so many other things.
The Mission is what you're trying to achieve (the profit motive, in some form), and the Values are the guardrails. They say explicitly what things you won't sacrifice (like human rights and lives) in service of the mission.
Having this stuff laid out clearly from the top down helps a lot with getting efforts to create and enforce those lower level processes taken seriously.
Unfortunately, sometimes people in the middle just assume that saving money is more important; the CEO might have told them to allocate resources, but the request just got squashed along the way.
"(In 2017) The rate of serious injuries, requiring time off or a work restriction, was 30 percent worse than the previous year’s industry average."
I'm interested to hear the data and information that went into your opinion that nothing will change.
We should probably halt agriculture and cancel automobiles also.
Also all injuries need a press release.
I suppose you can afford a few of them if you're SpaceX. (Especially the way they pay - your salary comes pre-reduced for several violations/year)
Details: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_ionizing_radiation_...
Most of the aerospace industry isn't in Los Angeles [1].
You might find it hard to believe, but having select few design equipment and processes that will then be used by much less skilled and paid workers is how most production companies work.
Now, I don't have any numbers. But if SpaceX is able to hire and maintain predominantly minority staff (assuming they are paid a reasonable wage) isn't it a win for those communities?
The question really is whether the company is reasonably trying to prevent unnecessary risks and react with changes when accidents happen.
???? Does a company need to make an announcement or public statement for every incident that occurs at work?
There are risks at every job. How is this even an article-worthy?
Already most companies do the absolute least OSHA lets them get away with (and often not even that...)
Unless there was an incident or a report of unsafe activity you aren't going to see OSHA.
The incident was reported to a federal agency. I’m not sure I’d want my medical history publicly aired if I were injured at work.
The family started a public GoFundme page. I think its clear that it is in the interest of both the family and labor at large to get stories about workplace injuries to the public.
It is however a private business taking public money. If a government was pumping millions of dollars into a company that was producing an unsafe work environment resulting in injury and death (not saying that is the case) but I think the public has a right to know.
In court, an apology, even something as simple as saying “sorry”, can be used as an admission of guilt. It behooves them to say as little as possible.
Uhh, wut? How many people have to die inside a private business before it does become other peoples business. And how do you know if you've got your blinders on.
A sadly large % of the people reading news on-line have nearly forgotten that hazardous real-world jobs still exist. (Vs. office jobs where "fell and sprained wrist while getting out of an extra-comfy wheely chair" is just about the worst workplace injury they can imagine.)
Also, it's SpaceX. Loads of construction, roofing, etc. workers get maimed & killed every year, and are barely worth a passing mention in the local paper.
There is a difference if a job is dangerous and somebody gets hurt or dies despite compliance with all safety measures or if an accident happens because of safety violations.
Being completely silent on the matter gives the appearance that they are pretending it didn't happen, that they want no one asking questions about it.
Should Space X proactively issue notice to the media and request for public feedback?
Should they be emailing all employees details?
Should Elon be posting on twitter for feedback?
<https://www.hseblog.com/osha-accident-reporting-requirements...>
Someone claimed that they were insufficiently open and I'm asking what they should have done that they did not
I am also wondering how many died of old age or depression in NASA while they were testing and scrubbing and delaying again.
There is a risk to no progress and being overly cautious too.
And the death rate is unlikely to be worse than: crab fishing, mining, petroleum extraction, manufacturing, etc.
and... "semafor"? Never heard of this. This article reeks of "popular hotbutton company" + "drama" to drive clicks.
The real issue is lack of universal healthcare of course.
In my opinion, it’s partly due to being an aging society. (1960 median age ~ 29, today it is around 39). Young people are generally more willing to be risky and try new things, and since the adults have all the power and are more litigious, of course we will end up ruled by rules and regulations that only get more complicated and time consuming.
Our society has never been safer, but we have used that comfort to be incredibly unhealthy/obese as well. Interesting times (possibly more boring times to come).