At SpaceX, worker injuries soar in Elon Musk's rush to Mars
reuters.comNot here defending SpaceX, cannot speak for some of the specific cases like the individual who was sitting on top of a truck to hold a load down. What I don't like though is the lack of real comparison. It reads more like a hit piece against spacex with all the specific examples of cases that tug at the heart. Would like to see some better comparison, I don't know how realistic the space industry average is. How many companies are in the space industry.
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.
I used to do workers comp insurance (which covers against the injuries in the article) and 600 injuries over almost 10 years sounds relatively in line with my expectations of a construction/prototyping firm. It sounds like the journalist got a leaked copy of the SpaceX loss runs. They tend to make the accidents sound more gruesome than they really are. If you get a papercut and report it, that shows up as a laceration on the sheet. Not saying there aren’t bad claims (amputation and death are never good!), but it’s very easy to make a company look bad even if they have good risk control.
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.
Ultimately, a worker sitting on top of a truck to hold down a load, is a failure of the company: rules and trainings have to be implace to avoid this unsafe behavior, managers, and ultimately the CEO, has to enforce those rules. If that doesn't happen an unsafe culture is promoted, one that leads to accidents.
Right, but this piece did not focus on the data and instead of pulled specific examples out. I think it would have been more convincing to at least speak more on the numbers, compare it to the US averages and look at different industries within the US. If I take the BLS average of missed days and other, 2.7 is higher then what I think is the 2.2 average that spacex has across different sites. I am not saying that means SpaceX is a safe place to work but we should dive into those details more to get a better picture.
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.
Journalists do seem to be given an extraordinarily wide allowance for selection bias.
Most negative stories about SpaceX / Tesla / Twitter could have been written about any of their competitors in the just by changing a few details.
Not when it comes to workplace saftey or going to war over some collective bargaining in Sweden, then not.
And Twitter, well, there are hardly any comparisons, are there?
Is SpaceX charging the DoD 435$ for a Hammer, or 600$ for a toilet seat? General Dynamics did
How do you train someone not to do stupid sh*t like that?
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.
Some companies have a strong safety culture. The importance of safety is prioritised. For instance, they are allowed and required to stop work being performed if they see a safety violation [1].
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 have to ensure that they don't do that. This can be through strict controls, peers and firing people you deem to do too much unsafe stuff.
> How do you train someone not to do stupid sh*t like that?
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.
This is unquestionably a hit piece. I’ve been to Boca Chica and their safety standards seem leagues ahead of oil and gas.
Here's an article showing how Musks other company, Tesla, has a 3x larger injury occurence in Berlin as e.g. Audi: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37689959
You all really need to stop shilling for that dude.
I am sorry you are upset/hurt but I am not defending any person or company. Simply pointing out that the article quotes 2.2/100 workers but that is lower than the US avg of 2.7/100 workers.
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.
Critical reading of potentially bad journalism isn't shilling.
Defending a known bad actor which has shown a pattern of same behaviour is.
They’re not defending the “known bad actor”. They’re criticizing the journalist for shoddy journalism.
From the subreddit:
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
> What I don't like though is the lack of real comparison
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.
Did you not read my comment? The US avg is 2.7/100, they spent 95% of the article talking about specific case and a quick comparison to the industry avg. That industry is so small I am not sure that it is a good comparison.
Exactly, ie. Qatar had something like 40 deaths during World Cup construction.
Some forced labour camps are even worse than that! Nothing to see here, just move on!
So just the cost of doing business.
You're ok with yourself or a loved one dying on that basis?
96 workers died building the Hoover Dam. In 8 years it will be 100 years since Construction started on the Hoover Dam. It seems like the US just isn't able to make projects like that anymore. Look at the progress of California's HSR,started by Governor Pete Wilson, who established the California High-Speed Rail Authority in 1996. 27 years ago. We have a century's advancement in technology, but the costs of construction, and inability to deal with risk has become a gigantic problem
Uhm, yes, not a comparandum that I'd love if I were a major business.
This is a problem with workplace culture and corresponds to equally poor culture in the other companies Musk controls.
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.
The article is disingenuous
> Other major space companies have also failed to report annual injury data to OSHA in some recent years.
This is all about higher than average injury rates at SpaceX, but just tucks this in after comparing the injury rates
I don't know the reality; it's awful for people involved in these accidents, disappointing if it is as cavalier as it's being painted, but it does also feel like I'm being told a version of events by the attorney for the plaintiff, rather than an impartial fact-contextualiser.
In defence of Reuters, articles about space companies without “Musk” in the headline do not get so many clicks. /s
I've always thought making people work long hours, repeatedly, would have a negative impact on their health. These injuries are far worse than I expected, but then I was only thinking about a desk job.
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.
I'm a fan of what SpaceX and Tesla are trying to achieve in a technical context (cheaper space flight and electrification of transport). Elon is obviously highly instrumental in this happening and should be recognized as such.
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.
For the keyboard warriors, defending it and telling people that it's individuals fault.
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?
As some who worked there for 4.5 years, this is an accurate description of the work culture at SpaceX. You sacrifice safety for speed. As a young person it’s an opportunity to take on a lot responsibilities, but at that point in your life you don’t have the fortitude to tell Elon, who does push the agenda directly to personnel, to say you do not deem this task safe/smart/responsible. Gwynn is a sly leader that tries to balance out Elon and non-Elon agendas, but will capitulate to Elon on a regular basis. You definitely do get fired for delaying any Elon focused project, regardless of the reason, if you’re annoying enough or easily replaceable. If you want to go toe to toe with Elon you better be the most productive person, with a good track record, have a rare skill set or knowledge, and be willing to risk your career.
Also, those numbers would be way more if they actually reported all the injuries and/or caught them all. Employees definitely hide their injuries cuz they want to keep their job.
If you guys only knew about the “near-misses” as well, they are wild.
I'm not surprised at all that the number of injuries sustained on SpaceX projects is even worse than described in the article.
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.
In a lot of US manufacturing plants, this stuff would get you fired. How does SpaceX get to skirt regulations?
Happy to be corrected here with citations, but I'm not sure that regulations are actually what get people fired. It's company policy.
Corporate policy that implements regulations would be my guess. Or, in this case, does not.
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.
But regulations don't say "fire this person". They're normally far more high level than that, like, "when something bad happens, trigger a corrective and preventative actions process and write down what you found and what you're going to change, if anything".
Effective regulations very much do put the employer on the hook, no way to accept something like "voluntary employee risk-taking" outside of in some cases not looking for it as hard as they could. Employers are at risk of getting fined for tolerating (or worse) employee risk-taking and if those fines are sufficiently high they will certainly tell the employee "stop doing that that or else". And the last stage of "or else" certainly is getting fired, perfectly in line with other worker protection laws that might be in place that would otherwise prevent that getting fired.
You seem to be agreeing with me. Companies don't have to fire people due to regulations. They may do so, or they may do all sorts of other things.
They're far more likely to fire people based on board pressure or PR. Regulations are the least impactful things here.
Correct.
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'.
Escaping to Mars and taking the source of why earth failed with you sounds like a stupid plan
Musk would have felt right at home driving the Soviet space program !
https://www.rmg.co.uk/stories/topics/space-race-timeline Given the Space Race timeline, it seems like that would mean beating NASA to MANY major milestones. 4 October 1957: The USSR successfully launches Sputnik 1, the first Earth-orbiting satellite in history.
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.
I'm still unsure as to why people are blaming Elon when I've been continuously told on this site that Glenn Shotwell is running everything.
when bad things happen, elon is responsible.
when good things happen, elon had nothing to do with it, he's useless and only do harm.
The thing is that the bad things are usually failures of management, the good things are feats of engineering. Elon Musk is despite the title he bestowed upon himself, not a rocket scientist. He's an ideas guy at worst and an activist executive at best.
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.
Gotta cut down them tall poppies
>Elon Musk is despite the title he bestowed upon himself, not a rocket scientist. He's an ideas guy at worst and an activist executive at best.
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...
Your quote suggests Cantrell thinks he's smart, not that he's technically competent, let alone competent enough to actually understand the nuances of the technology.
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).
Probably because Elon is the CEO
I would think that if you actually see that sort of comment so often that it would be reasonable to exaggerate it as “continuous”, you would be familiar enough with the person in question to know their actual name.
A worthy sacrifice for the advancement of humankind
If only Elon was actually advancing actual humanity, and not just his own narrow idea of what humanity should be.
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.
Also, if a manned mission to mars goes awry with a catastrophic failure due to cutting corners and carelessness Oceangate-style, we will probably see a massive slowdown and cut funding in space exploration in the future due to the bad publicity.
> And just in case someone mentions something like D-Day,
Did you mean the Eastern Front?
Yeah, that too, probably what I'd have said if I was typing in Cyrillic.
But I’m not typing in Cyrilic.
If you want to make an omelette, you need to crack a few eggs.
Also, chimpanzees ... haven't a few of them been sacrificed for space exploration?
Have these respective workers been informed of this agenda?
They can work wherever they want
Is Tesla putting up big banners on their website saying "we may kill some of you for Musk's greater good"?
Aztec spotted, lol
~~humankind~~
elonkind
Two of the examples of injuries sustained by workers given in the article sound like a lack of awareness of one’s personal safety was a major contributing factor in the accidents… Specifically, sitting on an unsecured load on a vehicle to hold it down, and being in close proximity to a rocket engine undergoing pressure testing.
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”.
This is why employees (usually) receive occupational safety training. You can't control employee's every move, but they fact that several people thought this was ok points to corporate failure, not an individual.
Its a balance. Thats why its important to have someone on the job site watching and noting issues for correction. Workers do not always think about their safety but want to get the job done as quickly and easily as possible, even if that puts their own lives as risk.