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.
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.
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