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.
That article's lede says that Starbase is more dangerous than other SpaceX facilities, not that SpaceX is dangerous per se? Also there's a sample size problem with numbers like that. Is SpaceX more dangerous than heavy industry in general, or some more related subset like aviation manufacturing?
As to your second line, I submit that commenting on HN that "Starbase is notorious for high accident rates" carries with it an implicit offer to provide said notes and not just punt to Google when challenged.
What a inane comment. They gave you a link that literally spoonfeeds the data and you complain because you can not be bothered to read until what is literally the second sentence in the article before accusing them of making statements in bad faith without supporting data.
> Starbase, a sprawling launch-and-manufacturing site that recently incorporated as its own Texas city, logged injury rates that were almost 6x higher than the average for comparable space vehicle-manufacturing outfits and nearly 3x higher than aerospace manufacturing as a whole in 2024, according to Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) data released in May.
Literally the second sentence which answers all of the questions you just posed and invalidates your accusations in the second paragraph. Geez.
Alternatively, here's some of the big players in various engineering, construction, mining, etc. heavy industries, taken directly from their websites/sustainability reports:
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
These metrics are reported on both internally and externally and make up major components of incentive payments. I'm completely used to management having 70+% of the incentive being tied to company performance, which is in turn strongly influenced by safety performance metrics.
I'm used to targets well under sub-1.0 TRIR at class 1 operators. Something like 4 would pause the project.
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.
Mining, quarrying, and oil and gas extraction: 1.2
Coal mining: 3.1
Heavy and civil engineering construction: 1.8
Animal slaughtering and processing: 3.2
Wood product manufacturing (inc. sawmills): 4.2
Foundries: 5.1
Aerospace product and parts manufacturing: 1.6
Rail transportation: 3.4
Judging solely by the aforementioned linked data, at 4.8, Brownsville should be shut down by management to do a safety intervention. McGregor and Hawthorne should be under the limelight, too. Redmond and CC seem good.
Wow, read the article and it's just clickbait. Reads like AI was heavily used as well. Did this publication get bought out? I seem to remember it being a good source in the past.
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.
> 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.
Are you accusing the media of misleading news about SpaceX, amazing bait for HN????
Yes, they are.
You're joking, right?
Starbase is notorious for high accident rates.
Data?
Start here: https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/18/spacex-worker-injury-rates...
Drill down into the links from there. Or do a search. Or ask an LLM. I have a hard time finding any data that doesn't think they have high rates.
That article's lede says that Starbase is more dangerous than other SpaceX facilities, not that SpaceX is dangerous per se? Also there's a sample size problem with numbers like that. Is SpaceX more dangerous than heavy industry in general, or some more related subset like aviation manufacturing?
As to your second line, I submit that commenting on HN that "Starbase is notorious for high accident rates" carries with it an implicit offer to provide said notes and not just punt to Google when challenged.
What a inane comment. They gave you a link that literally spoonfeeds the data and you complain because you can not be bothered to read until what is literally the second sentence in the article before accusing them of making statements in bad faith without supporting data.
> Starbase, a sprawling launch-and-manufacturing site that recently incorporated as its own Texas city, logged injury rates that were almost 6x higher than the average for comparable space vehicle-manufacturing outfits and nearly 3x higher than aerospace manufacturing as a whole in 2024, according to Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) data released in May.
Literally the second sentence which answers all of the questions you just posed and invalidates your accusations in the second paragraph. Geez.
This is trivially easy to check if you actually wanted to. Hell, I'll bring the receipts on your behalf.
These numbers are all total injury frequency rates per 100 employees or 200k hours (equivalent measures, assuming 50x 40-hour weeks)
Assuming the TC article that cites 4.27 at Starbase is accurate, it's well in excess of anything I'm used to seeing. Have a flick through here for industry-wide equivalents: https://www.bls.gov/web/osh/table-1-industry-rates-national....
Alternatively, here's some of the big players in various engineering, construction, mining, etc. heavy industries, taken directly from their websites/sustainability reports:
ExxonMobil: 0.1-0.2 https://corporate.exxonmobil.com/publications/metrics-and-da...
Chevron: 0.24 (p23) https://www.chevron.com/newsroom/media/publications/corporat...
Glencore: 2.14 (p15) https://www.glencore.com/.rest/api/v1/documents/static/9b103...
Jiangxi Copper: 1.5 (p132, NB: per million hours so /5) https://www1.hkexnews.hk/listedco/listconews/sehk/2025/0327/...
Fluor: 0.31 (p10) https://a.fluor.com/f/1014770/x/1d656014e2/2024-sustainabili...
Jacobs: 0.17 (p61) https://s205.q4cdn.com/384284279/files/doc_downloads/2024/ES...
Union Pacific: 0.9 (p8) https://www.up.com/content/dam/upcom/strategy-sustainability...
PG&E: 1.87 (p45) https://www.pgecorp.com/assets/pgecorp/csr/csr_2025/assets/p...
Baowu: 1.8 (p19, listed per 1000 employees so *10) https://res.baowugroup.com/attach/2025/09/18/4751f22bbb33484...
Parsons: 0.16 (p29) https://www.parsons.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/FY24-CARE...
Vale: 1.58 (p66) https://www.vale.com/documents/44618/430705/2025_Annual+Repo...
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...)
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.
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.
The fatality occurred at a construction site, not an aerospace manufacturing facility.
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.
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.
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.
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.
These metrics are reported on both internally and externally and make up major components of incentive payments. I'm completely used to management having 70+% of the incentive being tied to company performance, which is in turn strongly influenced by safety performance metrics.
I'm used to targets well under sub-1.0 TRIR at class 1 operators. Something like 4 would pause the project.
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...
>> 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
What industry is being compared, and how does that compare to what SpaceX is actually doing?
Here you go: https://www.bls.gov/web/osh/table-1-industry-rates-national....
Mining, quarrying, and oil and gas extraction: 1.2
Coal mining: 3.1
Heavy and civil engineering construction: 1.8
Animal slaughtering and processing: 3.2
Wood product manufacturing (inc. sawmills): 4.2
Foundries: 5.1
Aerospace product and parts manufacturing: 1.6
Rail transportation: 3.4
Judging solely by the aforementioned linked data, at 4.8, Brownsville should be shut down by management to do a safety intervention. McGregor and Hawthorne should be under the limelight, too. Redmond and CC seem good.
3x higher than other rocket builders. Comparing a rocket factory to a construction site it borderline laughable.
https://archive.ph/z7xCk
Sad to see what Scientific American has become.
Wow, read the article and it's just clickbait. Reads like AI was heavily used as well. Did this publication get bought out? I seem to remember it being a good source in the past.
Related:
Starship's Twelfth Flight Test
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48214558