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SpaceX punts Starship launch as investigation opens into Starbase worker's death
30 points by mywacaday 3 hours ago | 22 comments
  • Ajedi32
    Headline is misleading. The launch is happening tomorrow weather permitting, and the delays that already happened are most likely unrelated to the accident that killed the worker. There's also no evidence that accident rates at Starbase are higher than at any other US construction site.
    • codingdave
      You're joking, right?

      Starbase is notorious for high accident rates.

      • Ajedi32
        Compared to what? US average fatal accident rate for construction is 9.2 deaths per 100,000 full-time workers per year. In oil and gas extraction it's 13.8. In agriculture it's 20.9. In manufacturing it's 2.4. What's Starbase's rate?

        (Source: https://www.bls.gov/charts/census-of-fatal-occupational-inju...)

        • bryanlarsen
          Fatality rate is hard to compare because of the low divisor problem.

          Injury rate is 4.27 per 100. Which is under half the average value for active construction sites and 3x the average value for aerospace manufacturing facilities. Choose your comparator based on whether you want to praise or bash SpaceX.

          • NamTaf
            Where are you getting construction as double that? This BLS site states that total recordable injuries is 2.2 per 100 employees. https://www.bls.gov/web/osh/table-1-industry-rates-national....

            Remember, this is reportable injuries. not LTIs, not fatalities.

            As an aside, as someone who works on major engineering construction projects, 4.27 per 100 people is huge. I'm used to sub-1.0, and something like 4.x would be stop-the-project-safety-intervention significant.

          • Ajedi32
            Yes. Starbase is an active construction site right now, so that's why I chose that as a point of comparison. But obviously there's also a lot of aerospace manufacturing happening at the same time, so it makes sense the number would be somewhere between those two industries.
          • russdill
            The fatality occurred at a construction site, not an aerospace manufacturing facility.
        • jjk166
          I'm surprised mining is so low. As an outsider, it seems like similar work to construction but with the danger turned up to 11. I can think of multiple potential explanations, but I have no intuitive sense of which, if any, is likely right.
          • NamTaf
            I work in mining and mining-adjacent. Safety is taken seriously and process is rigorous. lock-out-tag-out, etc. is all huge in it.

            I'm used to targets well under sub-1.0 TRIR at class 1 operators. Something like 4 would pause the project.

        • orwin
          Those are very, very high numbers, no? I think France is one of the worst offender in the western world (or at least worst in Europe by far) and we have slightly inferior rates (3 times the eurozone average), and it's a big issue. Not politically, almost no one cares about blue collar workers, especially not the current government, but in companies (at least in mine), reducing death became a focus point for three years.
      • drob518
        Data?
    • Veserv
      What are you talking about? Injury rate at Starbase (Brownsville) was 6x higher than industry average in 2022 [1].

      Furthermore, you have gotten the burden of proof backwards. The default presumption is non-safety. The burden of proof is on insiders (who have all the access) to robustly demonstrate in a clear and convincing manner that things are safe, not on outsiders (who only have limited access) to demonstrate in a clear and convincing manner that things are dangerous.

      So, please present your evidence that their injury or fatality rate is normal. Absence of evidence defaults to your claim it is safe being unsupported.

      edit: codingdave comment has a more recent link that also determines 2023 and 2024 also had injury rates multiple times higher than industry average.

      https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48214074

      [1] https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/spacex-m...

      • NetMageSCW
        What industry is being compared, and how does that compare to what SpaceX is actually doing?
      • dolphinscorpion
        >> What are you talking about? Injury rate at Starbase (Brownsville) was 6x higher than industry average in 2022

        That's a sacrifice Elon is willing to make

    • sublinear
      > no evidence that accident rates at Starbase are higher than at any other US construction site

      I was actually just about to comment that it's surprising how few accidents we've heard about from a facility like that.

      Either they're doing an amazing job, or they have a great lid on it despite all that want to see them fail.

    • tekla
      Are you accusing the media of misleading news about SpaceX, amazing bait for HN????

      Yes, they are.

  • NetMageSCW
    Sad to see what Scientific American has become.