Workers at Redmond SpaceX lab exposed to toxic chemicals
fox13seattle.com
fox13seattle.com
It seems multiple generations have really downplaying the risk of some of these chemicals. The whole "man up" "osha is a joke" attitude really seems painfully helpless when there small amounts of chemicals that are undetectable by the senses that can kill you, damage your mind irreparably, damage your ability to have healthy children. Heck even our gender expression is controlled by a small amount of chemicals called hormones. I think some fragile egos hate to admit it, but we're entirely powerless to these chemicals unless we can detect and avoid them.
However when they are invisible and often odorless in dangerous doses, number in the 10s of thousands, and are very slow/expensive to detect (i.e. requiring $10k+ mass spectrometers), the only feasible answer I can think of is collective action (i.e. stronger laws, or perhaps unions if those fail). I think such events of pollution need to be investigated as criminal when they have credibly ended lives.
(P.S. I wonder if any women didn't have fullblown miscarriages, but had a baby with other issues that can't necessarily by tied to this exposure. This is something you see in other exposure cases)
This is pretty scary. Who knows what other health problems employees have are related to this issue. And SpaceX won’t comment or share what chemicals were involved? Horrible.
In any case, it seems strange that customer support staff, who are presumably not trained in haz-mat protocols etc, would be colocated with a lab using toxic chemicals.
Less than SpaceX spent a lawyers to appeal it. Less than the cost of ventilation.
I guess you can look forward to that happening again then!
Pro-tip, join a Trade Union, your country doesn't protect you
There must be no shortage of integrity & knowhow.
The problem arises when the chemicals on site add up to a need for professional handling exceeding that which exists at the site.
The top person has to actually know what to do, and actually step up to the plate and do it in complete co-operation with the ones at the front lines handling the materials. And everyone in between. Another whole level of risk management needs to focus on exposure radius when it can extend beyond the confines of the recognized hazardous site. The degree of risk relative to proximity can build to where many off-site occupants are not informed when things escalate beyond a minimal amount.
Which almost never happens ideally, even when it's a purpose-built chemical facility.
In an "office" building it can be a real slippery slope. Soldering a few cables or treating PCBs may not seem like a problem for an occasional prototype. And then with growth pressure you get a dozen people doing it all day every couple months. Pretty rough, but at least it's not every day and at least it's not every month.
How you get there and where you go from there is really the defining characteristic.
This repeated pattern of illegal, safety-regressive behavior must be a fluke. Frankly, if the leadership creates cultures that harm their workers and where retaliation against workers was normal, then you would expect that to occur at other companies they run. Like, some kind of successful lawsuit where workers complained about their supervisors calling all their black coworkers the N-word and all the swastikas on the walls then were reprimanded for bringing it up [7] where the judge legally declared the companies "conduct was reprehensible and repeated"[8] and awards in excess of the standard maximum were "appropriate in light of the endemic racism at the Tesla factory and Tesla's repeated failure to rectify it"[9].
See, the rampant disregard for their workers and retaliation against workers is not at all in their corporate DNA all the way to the top. Just your regular old California Bay Area company where workers are called the N-word [10] and get retaliated against.
[1] https://payloadspace.com/spacex-back-up-to-its-neck-in-disch...
[2] https://www.sacurrent.com/news/federal-government-fines-elon...
[3] https://fortune.com/2025/11/08/boring-company-drilling-fluid...
[4] https://fortune.com/2025/11/12/elon-musk-boring-company-tunn...
[5] https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/26184164-tbc-state-l...
[6] https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/spacex-m...
[7] https://www.govinfo.gov/app/details/USCOURTS-cand-3_17-cv-06...
[8] https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/USCOURTS-cand-3_17-cv-06... Page 29
[9] https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/USCOURTS-cand-3_17-cv-06... Page 1
[10] I mean seriously, where do you even find people who will use the N-word in the Bay Area. Did they put all their job ads in the KKK and Neo-Nazi Bay Area Facebook groups? Is it like one of those anti-spy tests where you have people say: "Death to (insert country leader here)", but you have to use the N-word to get hired?
Not Rube-ish or rubish at all, IMO. I believe they're more interested in power or recreational drug use than problem-solving. Horses for courses.
If I sell steel, grain, boots, or launch services to the government and that gives me profits that I invest into some aspect of my business, I’m not sure that “subsidized by” is the clearest term.
The “SpaceX lives on government subsidies” thing is a myth.
If I'm being too extreme, can you describe a world where you'd consider enough problems have been solved that it's worth spending billions colonizing space?
Instead of establishing multiplanetary civilisations, they're burning our single-planetary atmosphere in their hubris and ego.
Citation needed. What are the current projects to make this happen? Starship is a work in progress, but that by itself wont be able to create a colony out of thin air.
How can we credibly talk about saving lives on other planets when we are demonstrably unable to protect life on the only habitable world we actually have? If we are failing at basic stewardship here, what evidence is there that we would act more responsibly anywhere else?
It’s easier to provide for your own people as a BDFL over your own assets than navigate politics between 250 different countries with their own interests.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Dome_(missile_defense_s...
The increasing in funding for Space companies by DoD in the early SpaceX area (early 2000s) was related to DoD realizing they don't have enough assets over the middle east and wanted smaller companies and rockets to do faster deployment. This evolved further from DoD and since then with Firefly having done a number of missions based on that. Keyword is 'responsive launch'.
Space based missile defense in this period was clearly not the priority and communication, spy sats and navigation sats were getting the overwhelming amount of funding.
NASA on the other hand certainty didn't create COTS for missile defense reasons even if the leader of NASA was a supporter of investment missile defense (as many space people were and are). And the people who designed the COTS program certainty didn't think of that. There are detailed interviews with many of the people involved where they explain their reasons and how and why they came up with the programs.
As for Musk himself, there are details interviews with pretty much everybody that was involved early in SpaceX. And it quite clear that from the beginning Mars was the focus. Musk was not very well informed or interested in US space defense policy early on. And just like literally everybody, he knew much more about NASA then the DoD side of space. Remember that back then, there was much less information available about these things. Musk lived in Canada and then was busy with Internet stuff, he hardly was some kind of US defense nerd.
Its only when SpaceX moved on from the 'Greenhouse on Mars' project to a rocket company that Musk had to start seriously learning about the funding opportunities and commercial opportunity for small rockets. And eventually this lead him to sue DoD over access to contracts.
This whole conspiracy theory hinges on reinterpreting everything that happened in US space development from 1980 to 2020 as some hidden behind the scenes crusade to create Golden Dome and only collects evidence for this to be true and ignores literally all evidence that suggest this isn't the case.
The only thing that is totally clear, and nobody has ever disputed is that many space people in the US have thought about space missile defense since the 80s and always hoped that it would eventually happen.
Missile defense was always part of wider US space consideration, but claiming it was always the driving force for everything is simply not true.
The Mars concept was absolutely grounded in the same strategic goals for global missile defense. It was about aligning those pieces.
Many forget the DC-X.
What bearing does this have on any of this?
> Mars concept was absolutely grounded in the same strategic goals for global missile defense
No shit. A launch vehicle is a launch vehicle.
NASA at the time primary was doing a moon program called Constellation. And DoD was not really thinking much about deep space at all.
If you are talking about the other Mars program then I don't why that would be relevant in this context.
> Many forget the DC-X.
Not sure what you are implying here. NASA and DoD had periodic programs to do various things and test various things, including reuse. See X-33 and Rotary Rocket. But all those concepts involved Single Stage to Orbit and were arguably pretty dumb and incredibly unlikely to ever work.
If the question were about, did SpaceX invent re-usability or vertical landing then your point might be relevant, but it isn't.
Even if it was true that DC-X is the pure expression of some kind of missile defense obsessed deep state, then this would still be irrelevant for SpaceX.
If the top 1% would spend 1% of their wealth on preventing "low-hanging fruits" like
* children starving
* children dying from diseases whose vaccinations cost 1$
* educating people on things like STDs, etc
If there’s a government anywhere that isn’t providing this for its citizens, perhaps looking into why that government is such a failure would yield greater and more durable change than a point patch of just a few vaccines.
> If the top 1% would spend 1% of their wealth
Why should we expect/demand more generosity from only 1% of the population? Maybe everyone should spend 1% of their wealth on these efforts? It’s easy to be magnanimous with someone else’s wallet.
“More” generosity? As if any is given. And it’s not about “generosity”, it’s about contributing to the society they are taking from. Billionaires exploit everyone else to the point of causing disease and death then hoard all the money produced from that for themselves.
I was mainly referring to the "super rich" (Musk, Bezos, etc.) since this topic was about how SpaceX treats people and because "multi-planetary civilization" is primarily a thing I connect with their companies. I do donate ~10% of my income. Not sure how much the average FAANG-CEO does donate.
> If there’s a government anywhere that isn’t providing this for its citizens, perhaps looking into why that government is such a failure would yield greater and more durable change than a point patch of just a few vaccines.
Failed States and Corruption do exist. They have various complicated reasons which to address would certainly not be "a low-hanging fruit". Of course, solving these would be a good thing, but not within the scope of "donate food, donate medicine, pay teachers"
What’s the chance that or fraction of your dollar, my dollar, or a billionaire’s dollar will end up actually reaching and helping that child? We’ve all seen food aid donations fail to reach those in need for precisely the same corruption that caused it to be needed in the first place.
Also, I don't believe they'd ever be auto-sufficient, because of the aforementioned qualities of Mars: anoxic, sterile, radioactive and subzero. They'd certainly never thrive. More probably, they'd live in a kind of inescapable company-town, millions of miles away from the nearest jurisdiction, at the mercy of a guy known for brutalizing his workers, where going on strike means you probably just die. Sounds like absolute hell.
So, unfeasible, unrealistic, pointless. You can do much more good for humanity by investing here on Earth, obviously.
A mars colony is probably doable. A self-sustaining mars colony? For the length of time it would take a completely devastated Earth to recover? Absolutely impossible, at least with our current technology.
Think about the level of supply chain you'd need to get something like a computer or a solar panel made on Mars. Where do you get plastic? Iron ore? Copper? Pure fantasy.
It would still be cool to have a colony on mars.
Also "the most important thing?"
You don't think there's any lower hanging fruit on-planet we could attend to first? Maybe addressing hunger, poverty, pollution, resource wars? You think getting the first ten-thousand people to Mars is a bigger priority than eradicating diseases that kill 10 times that many annually and that we have all the tools necessary to control? Really really?