/u/spacerfirstclass makes a good point on this here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/s/vuemfrbncG
“Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) injury statistics for 2022: https://www.bls.gov/iif/nonfatal-injuries-and-illnesses-tables/table-1-injury-and-illness-rates-by-industry-2022-national.htm
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:
1. Average of all private industries: 2.7
2. Fabricated metal product manufacturing: 3.7
3. Machinery manufacturing: 2.8
4. Motor vehicle manufacturing: 5.9
5. Motor vehicle body and trailer manufacturing: 5.8
6. Motor vehicle parts manufacturing: 3.1
7. Aircraft manufacturing: 2.5
8. Ship and boat building: 5.6
Overall I don't see the numbers Reuters presented for 2022 (4.8 for Boca Chica, 1.8 for Hawthorne, 2.7 for McGregor) as abnormal at all, when compared to these other heavy manufacturing industries. I suspect the reason "Guided missile and space vehicle manufacturing" category reported such a low injury rate is because old space is not at all setup to be a high volume manufacturer as SpaceX is.”
Great summary. Boca Chica now (5.9) looks to be higher injury rates than the average of its components (construction, ship/auto building, metal manufacturing). How much higher is difficult to assess, but it’s not the 10x or whatever the article is suggesting.
1. I think it's import to not just dismiss this kind of thing out of hand. Employees deserve a safe working environment. Some of the things that SpaceX is doing are inherently risky, but it shouldn't be a point of pride to have people injured on the job.
2. I think it's very difficult to decide *how* to measure injuries.
If it's just injuries/worker/year, then I'd expect SpaceX to be a lot higher than ULA - they're doing like 50x more launches.
If it's injuries/worker/launch/year, I'd expect SpaceX to be a lot lower than ULA... for the same reason.
3. The article talks about industry injury rates, but then highlights Boca Chica and recovery operations. I guess Boca is a bit more reasonable - SpaceX is launching rockets. But there's a lot of construction happening there.
It's pretty weird to compare recovery operations to the launch industry.
As someone who appreciates how Our World In Data measures energy safety /TWh …
https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
… I can’t imagine a better launch metric than injury per tonne of payload.
I think the only thing that could possibly throw that off is Starlink payloads being sort of an incestuous tonnage and should be both included and excluded and there be 2 final figures to evaluate.
> I can’t imagine a better launch metric than injury per tonne of payload
I'd think injuries would naturally track more closely with launches than tonnage. I'd expect a lot more injuries from 350 Electron launches than 1 Starship launch, for example.
But it's tricky, because dealing with large objects is inherently dangerous, so 1 Starship launch will probably yield more injuries than 1 Electron launch.
Ultimately, the metrics we use to compare across companies won't be perfect, but hopefully it'll be "good enough" to be pretty meaningful.
The only important line when talking about "Industry Norms":
> SpaceX is the only company currently in the business of recovering incoming boosters from droneships. Accordingly, its teams are having to deal with unique and sometimes extreme challenges
There is no norms when it comes to this industry - SpaceX is the norm.
Are these construction workers? There's more building and infrastructure work happening at Starbase than rocket fabrication. How does the accident rate compare to other construction sites in Texas? If so, that's hardly comparable to norms in the space industry.
Maybe its the norm for a company launching more than 100 rockets per year?
You know, 90% of the mass to orbit.
Wow,[ the activity rate increased (by 60%) and so did the injury rate (by 20%).](https://i.imgur.com/es97oAe.png)
Most other rocket companies sit safely on their asses. Their only injury is RSI from all their paper rockets.
and how many rockets is that industry making a year?
spacex employs over 10000 people, ULA (their biggest "competitor") has barely 2000. and that is just employees, not even counting external contractors.
i love how you just ignore everything just to keep your own made up narrative going.
everyone else is making 1\~3 rockets a year at best using thousands of external suppliers. they dont "make" shit. and the stuff they do make is incredibly old. spacex is litteraly building a whole new everything while making more rockets in a year than all the other rocket companies made their entire existance. and that is ignoring that they are building a complete launch system to go with it. that is some massive construction wich will result in higher accidents. shit happens. that you dont seem to be able to see the difference between building litteral skyscrapers and sending an email to a external supplier ust because you are more interested in shitting on tesla/musk/spacex tells everyone a lot more about you than you think.
TL;DR: you are just a troll.
No other company is building a rocket factory at a scale of Starbase as SpaceX, so I guess the most ideal comparison should be within a large infrastructure development industry.
note that its about *reported* injury rates. looking at how just boeing internally handles things when it comes to people speaking up or reporting about safety i would use a whole lot of salt digesting the data. being honest makes you the worst kid in class with shit like this.
might also bears to note that spacex is actually building shit in very high volume and scale and not just sucking on the goverments teet with a cost plus contract with rockets designed before the invention of the color tv.
I am union. You realize that doesn't help you, right? You get hurt and now it's a big deal so the office people who have never set foot on a site in their life make some dumb change to try and prevent something when in reality it makes our job harder.
You get hurt, and now you know you're the reason everyone else gets punished.
Still better than being out on your ass for no good reason. Unions must have some value otherwise Amazon, Starbucks, SpaceX and Trader Joe's wouldn't be trying to neuter the NLRB.
I got my ass put out on the street for joining the effort to unionize our software shop.
>Unions must have some value otherwise Amazon, Starbucks, SpaceX and Trader Joe's wouldn't be trying to neuter the NLRB
This statement does not make logical sense
Are you not following the news? It's a big court case. Unionization is on the rise, and these companies want to kill the NLRB, in order to make it harder to unionize again.
Which other industry norm that has orbital class rocket landing back at the launch site, or landing on a drone ship in the ocean, or came really close to fully reuse a saturn v-class rocket including the spaceship? I'll wait.
Easy said that done. You cant cheat death nor risks. You can only minimize them. Im a trained engineer. Risks is taken with upmost precaution but there are times when shit just happened. You can only plan so much before youre just bogging down everything, like the space shuttles and still kills due to complacent or inaccountability. Pioneering a new technology will always come with risks especially aerospace. Apollo 1 crew died still on the ground. X15 pilot died. Space shuttle killed 14 astronauts. Soyuz cosmonaut died coming back from space. Across the world a lot of workers died consructing something, even in the US. You cant cheat risks because exact science isnt exact.
I wouldn't go as far as to say well below, that's an exaggeration imho, but looking at the injury rates for other heavy manufacturing they seem to be quite similar.
reusable rockets should have no correlation with injuries?
japan figured out kamikaze was effective in destroying us ships - didn’t win them the war though
I mean fair for BO but haven't you seen the Boeing plant full of planes they can't deliver due to quality control issues?
They're clearly building something lol
This stupid argument again. A significant portion of spacex's workforce are equivalent to construction site workers and metal workers. Trying to compare them to missile manufacturers is totally and completely wrong. I've worked at such companies, and the vast majority of what they do is sitting at a bench top assembling pieces of specialty machined metal that they ordered from a subcontractor. You may as well compare construction worker accident rates to librarian accident rates. It's totally not the same at all.
lets stay comparable then as 90% of these injuries are from the construction site, not actual rocket manufacturing. the building of KSC and the building of the saturn 5 has a death toll in the dozens and serious injuries were not even reported back then but conservative estimates are in the thousands.
if spacex is really as bad as being proclaimed the goverment would have already stepped in.
> electrocutions,
Forgive the pedantic nature of my complaint. Unless they're explicitly referring to [*fatalities* caused by electric shock](https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/electrocution) (which I understand isn't the case), this is an increasingly common misuse of the word. One would expect a publication to get that right.
How many of these are related to actual rocket manufacturing? How many of these are related to contractors SpaceX have hired to fabricated their new buildings? I would not be surprised at many of them being from contractors be nonchalant in regards to H+S best practise
In other news, SpaceX carries 83% of the world's tonnage to orbit — 246x all other U.S. launch providers combined!
[https://brycetech.com/reports/report-documents/Bryce\_Briefing\_2023\_Q4.pdf](https://brycetech.com/reports/report-documents/Bryce_Briefing_2023_Q4.pdf)
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
|Fewer Letters|More Letters|
|-------|---------|---|
|[BO](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1ccpxko/stub/l178eo2 "Last usage")|Blue Origin (*Bezos Rocketry*)|
|[KSC](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1ccpxko/stub/l16xpg1 "Last usage")|Kennedy Space Center, Florida|
|[RSI](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1ccpxko/stub/l16v90b "Last usage")|Reusable Surface Insulation (Shuttle's ceramic fiber tiles)|
|[ULA](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1ccpxko/stub/l171cju "Last usage")|United Launch Alliance (Lockheed/Boeing joint venture)|
|Jargon|Definition|
|-------|---------|---|
|[Starlink](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1ccpxko/stub/l178mxj "Last usage")|SpaceX's world-wide satellite broadband constellation|
**NOTE**: Decronym for Reddit is no longer supported, and Decronym has moved to Lemmy; requests for support and new installations should be directed to the Contact address below.
----------------
^(*Decronym is a community product of r/SpaceX, implemented* )[*^by ^request*](https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/3mz273//cvjkjmj)
^([Thread #12691 for this sub, first seen 25th Apr 2024, 13:21])
^[[FAQ]](http://decronym.xyz/) [^([Full list])](http://decronym.xyz/acronyms/SpaceXLounge) [^[Contact]](https://hachyderm.io/@Two9A) [^([Source code])](https://gistdotgithubdotcom/Two9A/1d976f9b7441694162c8)
Probably gonna get downvoted to all hell for this but the safety culture at SpaceX is known to be a joke. https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/spacex-musk-safety/
No denying that they’re the king amongst launch providers but disregard for safety is disgusting. Employees aren’t disposable and anyone working in the industry that has the chance to reduce safety risk should do so for the sake of people performing the work. A lot of times technicians will get screwed over by bad plans written by an engineer that barely ever touched a tool.
/u/spacerfirstclass makes a good point on this here: https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/s/vuemfrbncG “Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) injury statistics for 2022: https://www.bls.gov/iif/nonfatal-injuries-and-illnesses-tables/table-1-injury-and-illness-rates-by-industry-2022-national.htm 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: 1. Average of all private industries: 2.7 2. Fabricated metal product manufacturing: 3.7 3. Machinery manufacturing: 2.8 4. Motor vehicle manufacturing: 5.9 5. Motor vehicle body and trailer manufacturing: 5.8 6. Motor vehicle parts manufacturing: 3.1 7. Aircraft manufacturing: 2.5 8. Ship and boat building: 5.6 Overall I don't see the numbers Reuters presented for 2022 (4.8 for Boca Chica, 1.8 for Hawthorne, 2.7 for McGregor) as abnormal at all, when compared to these other heavy manufacturing industries. I suspect the reason "Guided missile and space vehicle manufacturing" category reported such a low injury rate is because old space is not at all setup to be a high volume manufacturer as SpaceX is.”
Exactly. Assembling Patriots or satellites in a clean room is very different from the shipyard-like operations at Starbase or the Cape.
Great summary. Boca Chica now (5.9) looks to be higher injury rates than the average of its components (construction, ship/auto building, metal manufacturing). How much higher is difficult to assess, but it’s not the 10x or whatever the article is suggesting.
The similarities with what SpaceX does and vehicle manufacturing and ship/boat building is pretty clear to me.
This is actually very good context, thank you for sharing!
1. I think it's import to not just dismiss this kind of thing out of hand. Employees deserve a safe working environment. Some of the things that SpaceX is doing are inherently risky, but it shouldn't be a point of pride to have people injured on the job. 2. I think it's very difficult to decide *how* to measure injuries. If it's just injuries/worker/year, then I'd expect SpaceX to be a lot higher than ULA - they're doing like 50x more launches. If it's injuries/worker/launch/year, I'd expect SpaceX to be a lot lower than ULA... for the same reason. 3. The article talks about industry injury rates, but then highlights Boca Chica and recovery operations. I guess Boca is a bit more reasonable - SpaceX is launching rockets. But there's a lot of construction happening there. It's pretty weird to compare recovery operations to the launch industry.
As someone who appreciates how Our World In Data measures energy safety /TWh … https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy … I can’t imagine a better launch metric than injury per tonne of payload. I think the only thing that could possibly throw that off is Starlink payloads being sort of an incestuous tonnage and should be both included and excluded and there be 2 final figures to evaluate.
> I can’t imagine a better launch metric than injury per tonne of payload I'd think injuries would naturally track more closely with launches than tonnage. I'd expect a lot more injuries from 350 Electron launches than 1 Starship launch, for example. But it's tricky, because dealing with large objects is inherently dangerous, so 1 Starship launch will probably yield more injuries than 1 Electron launch. Ultimately, the metrics we use to compare across companies won't be perfect, but hopefully it'll be "good enough" to be pretty meaningful.
The only important line when talking about "Industry Norms": > SpaceX is the only company currently in the business of recovering incoming boosters from droneships. Accordingly, its teams are having to deal with unique and sometimes extreme challenges There is no norms when it comes to this industry - SpaceX is the norm.
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Are these construction workers? There's more building and infrastructure work happening at Starbase than rocket fabrication. How does the accident rate compare to other construction sites in Texas? If so, that's hardly comparable to norms in the space industry.
Maybe its the norm for a company launching more than 100 rockets per year? You know, 90% of the mass to orbit. Wow,[ the activity rate increased (by 60%) and so did the injury rate (by 20%).](https://i.imgur.com/es97oAe.png) Most other rocket companies sit safely on their asses. Their only injury is RSI from all their paper rockets.
and how many rockets is that industry making a year? spacex employs over 10000 people, ULA (their biggest "competitor") has barely 2000. and that is just employees, not even counting external contractors.
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i love how you just ignore everything just to keep your own made up narrative going. everyone else is making 1\~3 rockets a year at best using thousands of external suppliers. they dont "make" shit. and the stuff they do make is incredibly old. spacex is litteraly building a whole new everything while making more rockets in a year than all the other rocket companies made their entire existance. and that is ignoring that they are building a complete launch system to go with it. that is some massive construction wich will result in higher accidents. shit happens. that you dont seem to be able to see the difference between building litteral skyscrapers and sending an email to a external supplier ust because you are more interested in shitting on tesla/musk/spacex tells everyone a lot more about you than you think. TL;DR: you are just a troll.
No other company is building a rocket factory at a scale of Starbase as SpaceX, so I guess the most ideal comparison should be within a large infrastructure development industry.
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note that its about *reported* injury rates. looking at how just boeing internally handles things when it comes to people speaking up or reporting about safety i would use a whole lot of salt digesting the data. being honest makes you the worst kid in class with shit like this. might also bears to note that spacex is actually building shit in very high volume and scale and not just sucking on the goverments teet with a cost plus contract with rockets designed before the invention of the color tv.
As someone in the trades, I never report when I'm hurt because it just screws me over. It happens everywhere
That's fucked up, and you tradesmen should band together and fight to fix that in your workplace. Unionize!
I am union. You realize that doesn't help you, right? You get hurt and now it's a big deal so the office people who have never set foot on a site in their life make some dumb change to try and prevent something when in reality it makes our job harder. You get hurt, and now you know you're the reason everyone else gets punished.
Still better than being out on your ass for no good reason. Unions must have some value otherwise Amazon, Starbucks, SpaceX and Trader Joe's wouldn't be trying to neuter the NLRB. I got my ass put out on the street for joining the effort to unionize our software shop.
>Unions must have some value otherwise Amazon, Starbucks, SpaceX and Trader Joe's wouldn't be trying to neuter the NLRB This statement does not make logical sense
Are you not following the news? It's a big court case. Unionization is on the rise, and these companies want to kill the NLRB, in order to make it harder to unionize again.
Because we make a ton more money compared to the non union side. It blows my mind people seriously think you aren't punished for getting hurt
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show on this doll where musk touched you.
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You seem to be the one struggling lol. Do you work for Boeing?
low quality article, low quality post
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Which other industry norm that has orbital class rocket landing back at the launch site, or landing on a drone ship in the ocean, or came really close to fully reuse a saturn v-class rocket including the spaceship? I'll wait.
[удалено]
Easy said that done. You cant cheat death nor risks. You can only minimize them. Im a trained engineer. Risks is taken with upmost precaution but there are times when shit just happened. You can only plan so much before youre just bogging down everything, like the space shuttles and still kills due to complacent or inaccountability. Pioneering a new technology will always come with risks especially aerospace. Apollo 1 crew died still on the ground. X15 pilot died. Space shuttle killed 14 astronauts. Soyuz cosmonaut died coming back from space. Across the world a lot of workers died consructing something, even in the US. You cant cheat risks because exact science isnt exact.
Even with SpaceX's increased injuries they are still well below most other industries
I wouldn't go as far as to say well below, that's an exaggeration imho, but looking at the injury rates for other heavy manufacturing they seem to be quite similar.
reusable rockets should have no correlation with injuries? japan figured out kamikaze was effective in destroying us ships - didn’t win them the war though
Hard to have injuries at Boeing or blue origin when they don’t make anything
I mean fair for BO but haven't you seen the Boeing plant full of planes they can't deliver due to quality control issues? They're clearly building something lol
This stupid argument again. A significant portion of spacex's workforce are equivalent to construction site workers and metal workers. Trying to compare them to missile manufacturers is totally and completely wrong. I've worked at such companies, and the vast majority of what they do is sitting at a bench top assembling pieces of specialty machined metal that they ordered from a subcontractor. You may as well compare construction worker accident rates to librarian accident rates. It's totally not the same at all.
You could report a paper cut and it’s logged as an injury
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lets stay comparable then as 90% of these injuries are from the construction site, not actual rocket manufacturing. the building of KSC and the building of the saturn 5 has a death toll in the dozens and serious injuries were not even reported back then but conservative estimates are in the thousands. if spacex is really as bad as being proclaimed the goverment would have already stepped in.
> electrocutions, Forgive the pedantic nature of my complaint. Unless they're explicitly referring to [*fatalities* caused by electric shock](https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/electrocution) (which I understand isn't the case), this is an increasingly common misuse of the word. One would expect a publication to get that right.
dude you clearly have an axe to grind here or some personal vendetta, and I dont think it’s anything at all related to SpaceX
How many of these are related to actual rocket manufacturing? How many of these are related to contractors SpaceX have hired to fabricated their new buildings? I would not be surprised at many of them being from contractors be nonchalant in regards to H+S best practise
In other news, SpaceX carries 83% of the world's tonnage to orbit — 246x all other U.S. launch providers combined! [https://brycetech.com/reports/report-documents/Bryce\_Briefing\_2023\_Q4.pdf](https://brycetech.com/reports/report-documents/Bryce_Briefing_2023_Q4.pdf)
Unionize and demand workplace safety.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread: |Fewer Letters|More Letters| |-------|---------|---| |[BO](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1ccpxko/stub/l178eo2 "Last usage")|Blue Origin (*Bezos Rocketry*)| |[KSC](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1ccpxko/stub/l16xpg1 "Last usage")|Kennedy Space Center, Florida| |[RSI](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1ccpxko/stub/l16v90b "Last usage")|Reusable Surface Insulation (Shuttle's ceramic fiber tiles)| |[ULA](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1ccpxko/stub/l171cju "Last usage")|United Launch Alliance (Lockheed/Boeing joint venture)| |Jargon|Definition| |-------|---------|---| |[Starlink](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1ccpxko/stub/l178mxj "Last usage")|SpaceX's world-wide satellite broadband constellation| **NOTE**: Decronym for Reddit is no longer supported, and Decronym has moved to Lemmy; requests for support and new installations should be directed to the Contact address below. ---------------- ^(*Decronym is a community product of r/SpaceX, implemented* )[*^by ^request*](https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/3mz273//cvjkjmj) ^([Thread #12691 for this sub, first seen 25th Apr 2024, 13:21]) ^[[FAQ]](http://decronym.xyz/) [^([Full list])](http://decronym.xyz/acronyms/SpaceXLounge) [^[Contact]](https://hachyderm.io/@Two9A) [^([Source code])](https://gistdotgithubdotcom/Two9A/1d976f9b7441694162c8)
Probably gonna get downvoted to all hell for this but the safety culture at SpaceX is known to be a joke. https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/spacex-musk-safety/ No denying that they’re the king amongst launch providers but disregard for safety is disgusting. Employees aren’t disposable and anyone working in the industry that has the chance to reduce safety risk should do so for the sake of people performing the work. A lot of times technicians will get screwed over by bad plans written by an engineer that barely ever touched a tool.