At SpaceX, worker injuries soar in Elon Musk's rush to Mars
reuters.com
reuters.com
The BLS total recordable cases for all US report in 2022 (cases involving days away from work and other) is 2.7 per 100. Would have liked the article to dive more into the data details instead of the specific cases. Too easy to focus on specific cases and ignore what the data means. I am not sure if comparing this to other space industry companies is fair. I have no idea who is included but are the engineers on a team included in these worker counts? So my best comparison is the total rate listed by BLS which is 2.7/100.
Worker deaths will always exist, sometimes due to unsafe practices and sometimes the fault of the worker. Every 101minutes a worker dies in the US. This is why OSHA exists.
Most negative stories about SpaceX / Tesla / Twitter could have been written about any of their competitors in the just by changing a few details.
And Twitter, well, there are hardly any comparisons, are there?
What’s saying that employee didn’t go through H&S training?
I get the legalities, it’s just a fringe case to the extreme, and conflation of that case to imply some wider problem.
Reads like a hit piece.
There needs good safety culture. If all your peers will give you an earful if they catch you doing something so visibly dangerous, you'll be less inclined to be a cowboy. Culture usually comes from the top down.
If you take safety seriously you're likely to have a safe workplace. If not you get these sorts of shenanigans.
[1] https://millercares.com/how-stop-work-authority-helps-preven...
You're ok with yourself or a loved one dying on that basis?
I’m not denying that there probably were gaps in personal safety, but my guess is the risk manager has improved process. If this weren’t the case, no one would sell them workers comp insurance. I agree this looks like a hit piece.
You all really need to stop shilling for that dude.
I don't think its very constructive to compare two different companies or from a geographical region. Similarly, I don't think its good journalism to point out specific cases without diving deeper into the data. I want to compare it to other industries, the US as a whole, how is it being measured etc. For all we know the other companies in the "missile/space" category include a large engineering staff. I really don't know and whats what I want to dive in. Thats why we have OSHA in the US. If OSHA is not doing its job lets dive into whats happening there first. Why is OSHA not putting appropriate pressure on SpaceX if they are violating guidelines? Workers in SpaceX can also easily report anon to OSHA, or at least that used to be the case a few years ago. We don't know but it would be interesting investigative journalism.
Did you read the article?
> The 2022 injury rate at the company’s manufacturing-and-launch facility near Brownsville, Texas, was 4.8 injuries or illnesses per 100 workers – six times higher than the space-industry average of 0.8. Its rocket-testing facility in McGregor, Texas, where LeBlanc died, had a rate of 2.7, more than three times the average. The rate at its Hawthorne, California, manufacturing facility was more than double the average at 1.8 injuries per 100 workers. The company’s facility in Redmond, Washington, had a rate of 0.8, the same as the industry average.
Also, what's missed in your logic - safety is a process. You can see lots of evidence in this article (which isn't surprising, as Musk talks about it openly) that they avoid process of safety, view it as one-off responsibilities and will cut it whenever they need to move fast on some artificial goals set by the wealthiest man on earth.
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
He's moving fast and breaking things, namely people, be it his customers or employees.
But no problem: pay a fine, roll out another phalanx of lawyers and there is little real cost. If CEOs were prosecuted for negligent homicide the number of preventable workplace and product deaths would surely drop to zero.
This is all about higher than average injury rates at SpaceX, but just tucks this in after comparing the injury rates
I love what SpaceX and Tesla are doing, but it's difficult to be an Elon fan when people are being seriously hurt because of bad policies.
But his conduct otherwise has not been respectable and that too should be recognized.
People tend to all all or nothing but the answer is usually somewhere in between.
Lots of you work in tech, behind the desk. If the system you're working on keeps on breaking when others interact with it - is their fault or is the system not advanced enough? If you give all your employees root access to the production, and expect them to use it wisely and care about safety - when it something breaks - is it the fault of the employee or fault of the company for allowing such a reckless actions?
If you guys only knew about the “near-misses” as well, they are wild.
The article only discusses employee injuries; A full accounting would also include data from on-site contractors such as those involved in the heavy construction of the launch towers and other facilities.
Other countries are far more into preemptive enforcement of regulations than the USA, but even there things tends to only get better before they get worse. Tesla Grünheide has already racked up at least one amputation, and that's a factory, not a place where they invent new kinds of rockets.
They're far more likely to fire people based on board pressure or PR. Regulations are the least impactful things here.
More like: 'we have a policy to follow regulations, you have blatantly broken regulations that has now put us at risk, thus you are non-compliant with our policy to follow regulations, so good-bye'.
3 November 1957: The USSR successfully launches Sputnik 2, carrying a dog named Laika into space. They become the first nation to successfully send a living organism into orbit.
12 September 1959: The USSR launches Luna 2 and accomplishes its mission of creating the first spacecraft to reach the surface of the Moon.
4 October 1959: The USSR launches Luna 3 and succeeds in their mission of sending an object into orbit around the Moon and photographing the far side of the Moon.
12 April 1961: The Soviet Union achieve a clear triumph in the space race. Aboard the Vostok 1, Yuri Gagarin makes a single orbit around the Earth and becomes the first man to reach space. He remained in space for one hour and forty-eight minutes before landing in Saratov Oblast, west Russia.
when good things happen, elon had nothing to do with it, he's useless and only do harm.
That the first three Tesla models spell out "S3X" is entirely on him. That they're fairly decent electrical cars is not. That there are superchargers everywhere is on him. That they work isn't. Based on his own statements, his public actions and credible allegations against him, workplace safety is not something he has any interest in and is willing to sacrifice when it inconveniences him, even aesthetically. He wants to move fast and break things, including manufacturing workers.
If you really think that someone who spent more time in his career networking, giving interviews, schmoozing and being CEO and representitive figurehead of multiple companies at the same time is also personally responsible for the engineering achievements of even one of those companies, you're delusional. It is however fairly easy in that kind of position to get in the way of good or important things.
This is where the industry in-jokes about clueless managers and "pointy-haired bosses" came from as well as the design advise to always include one glaring mistake because managers (or clients) want to feel like they contributed something and giving them an easy error to catch is safer than risking "actual input" from them. I don't know if it's the lies we tell ourselves because we want to be entrepreneurs without sacrificing our craftsmanship or the mythological narratives that drive the ever-increasing tech bubble, but somewhere along the way some of us have started getting high on our own supply and started to believe that people like Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos or Steve Jobs are actual geniuses (I think it started with Steve Jobs) rather than just very successful sales people with some broad baseline technical understanding that is enough to judge some technical decisions but not enough to make them alone.
while i agree, we also have jim cantrell (an actual rocket scientist) comments on musk[0]:
>"He is the smartest guy I've ever met, period," Cantrell tells us. "I know that sounds overblown. But I've met plenty of smart people, and I don't say that lightly. He's absolutely, frickin' amazing. I don't even think he sleeps."
now, am i a musk fanboi? nope. he has some horrible ideas (twitter is x? wtf?). but is he just an "ideas" guy? absolutely not.
[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/how-elon-musk-learned-rocket...
Getting the powers-that-be to understand technical intricacies is as much about having someone able to explain concepts well to someone who is not a domain expert as it is about having someone who is not a domain expert able to reason about problems with an incomplete understanding. That you can explain technology to Musk and get him to ask relevant questions or that he can pick up enough jargon and specific concepts to hold his own in a casual technical conversation doesn't mean he's an omni-genius let alone that he understands the technology.
Yes, "ideas guy" is an extremely uncharitable way to put it, but that's why I said "at worst" that's what he is. The Tesla cybertruck and the Hyperloop are certainly ideas guy products (the latter literally because what he envisioned is so nonsensical none of the so-called implementations actually have anything to do with it and those that try obviously underperform even moderate expectations). Clearly many things he's heading have worked out better than that. But if you look at the actual things he's done himself and his actual biography (rather than the hagiography he has created for himself) he is a lot more underwhelming and his success much more a product of being in the right place at the right time and hanging onto the right coat tails (e.g. Peter Thiel, who is equally despicable as a human being but clearly more technologically competent).
elonkind
Also, trying to establish a self-sustaining base on Mars right now is short-sighted and a tremendous waste of energy and material.
Also also, how you do a thing is (often) as important as doing the thing itself, we're still suffering the consequences of last centuries megalomaniacal claims to be advancing humanity at the expense of a few people.
And just in case someone mentions something like D-Day, I doubt any of Elon's workers signed on to sacrifice their bodies to "save humanity" in the same way the Allies signed up (or consented to be drafted) to save Europe.
Did you mean the Eastern Front?
I’m sure the lack of a culture of safety and availability of equipment bears some of the blame, but some responsibility has to rest with the individual to say “no, I don’t think it’s a good idea to put my head in there”.