The 2023 records, newly disclosed by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, also show that injury rates at some SpaceX facilities grew worse than those the company had reported in 2022. At its manufacturing-and-launch facility in Brownsville, Texas, for instance, SpaceX reported 5.9 injuries per 100 workers, surpassing its rate of 4.8 injuries in 2022 and topping a space industry average of 0.8.
Can you elaborate on what constitutes the “space industry” in this sense? Sometimes the OSHA groupings don’t align as well as one would think. A wet lab testing material compatibility and a rocket test stand can both be “aerospace” but have very different risk profiles.
Fatalities certainly aren't the whole story, but they do have one "advantage": they cannot be hushed away, at least not in the Western world. (In China or Russia, well...)
That is why, in an analogical situation, crime and public safety of individual countries is often compared using murder levels. It is expected that most developed countries cannot really suppress/fudge murder statistics, even though they can do a lot of shenanigans around registration of lesser crime.
I can see a similar situation with individual corporations and their diligence when it comes to reporting injuries.
Even murder statistics aren't foolproof when comparing crime rates across different countries and time periods, because of differences in medical care standards. Someone can be shot several times in the modern West and recover, but 200 years ago or in a poor country (or maybe in a more remote location) the same person would not survive and it would count as a homicide.
I imagine these numbers can get padded by including people that have no chance of injury because nothing new is being done (ie human exploration has always been risky).
Comments
Fatalities aren't the whole story.
That's 7x the industry average.
Ref: https://www.usnews.com/news/top-news/articles/2024-04-22/exc...
Can you elaborate on what constitutes the “space industry” in this sense? Sometimes the OSHA groupings don’t align as well as one would think. A wet lab testing material compatibility and a rocket test stand can both be “aerospace” but have very different risk profiles.
Could it be a reporting issue?
Fatalities certainly aren't the whole story, but they do have one "advantage": they cannot be hushed away, at least not in the Western world. (In China or Russia, well...)
That is why, in an analogical situation, crime and public safety of individual countries is often compared using murder levels. It is expected that most developed countries cannot really suppress/fudge murder statistics, even though they can do a lot of shenanigans around registration of lesser crime.
I can see a similar situation with individual corporations and their diligence when it comes to reporting injuries.
Even murder statistics aren't foolproof when comparing crime rates across different countries and time periods, because of differences in medical care standards. Someone can be shot several times in the modern West and recover, but 200 years ago or in a poor country (or maybe in a more remote location) the same person would not survive and it would count as a homicide.
I imagine these numbers can get padded by including people that have no chance of injury because nothing new is being done (ie human exploration has always been risky).