SpaceX employees are sustaining an outrageous amount of injuries, once again exceeding the industry average in 2023, according to safety data reported to U.S. regulators by the aerospace company helmed by CEO Elon Musk.
The 2023 records from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, reviewed by Reuters, show that injury rates at some SpaceX facilities got worse in 2023 than in 2022. The outlet points out that in 2022, the Brownsville, Texas facility reported 4.8 injuries per 100 workers. That number jumped to 5.9 in 2023. For reference, the aerospace industry average is 0.8 injuries per 100 workers.
However, those numbers may not be telling the whole story. Last year, Reuters investigated these injury numbers and found at least 600 previously unreported worker injuries at SpaceX. Some of those injuries led to crushed limbs, amputations, and serious head injuries as well as a death.
The 2023 data is the most complete report provided by SpaceX to date, and it highlights injuries from eight major facilities, two more than in 2022. In previous years, Musk’s company hadn’t reported any data for most of its sites, including manufacturing and launching facilities.
These astronomical (I’m so sorry) injury rates should be a great cause for concern for SpaceX clients like NASA, according to safety experts. From Reuters:
The federal space program has increasingly relied on SpaceX in recent years and as of 2022 had paid the company at least $11.8 billion for various contracts.
“NASA should be concerned about the quality of the work,” said David Michaels, a former OSHA administrator who is now a professor at The George Washington University. High injury rates, he added, can be “an indicator of poor production quality.”
A NASA spokesperson didn’t respond to a request for comment.
The further you delve into these numbers from SpaceX, the more alarming it gets. A unit that retrieves rocket boosters in the Pacific Ocean has reported 7.6 injuries per 100 workers. That is nine times higher than the industry average. In other words, SpaceX is a menace to safety.
Of the eight facilities reported by SpaceX, not a single one is at or below the industry average. If you want to work at the aerospace company and mitigate the risk of being injured as much as possible, you’ll need to work at its Redmond facility which still had a 1.5 injuries per 100 workers rate in 2023.
Shockingly, neither Musk or SpaceX as a whole have ever commented on the company’s disastrous safety record.
