An Accident at SpaceX

https://www.semafor.com/article/10/18/2022/space-x-technician-accident

by alphabetting • 4 years ago

300 197 4 years ago

carabiner• 4 years ago

This is a glimpse of the aerospace industry behind the curtain. Much of it is backed by the filipino and hispanic working class in LA. These guys live in the roughest neighborhoods and are in charge of precision assembly of human transport. I don't know the exact ratio, but maybe 5 technicians like him per office engineer.

JumpCrisscross3• 4 years ago

Much of it is backed by the filipino and hispanic working class in LA

Most of the aerospace industry isn't in Los Angeles [1].

[1] https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes172011.htm#st

adolph• 4 years ago

What's wrong with folks who live in "the roughest neighborhoods" being "in charge of precision assembly of human transport?"

twawaaay2• 4 years ago

SpaceX is a for profit organisation.

You might find it hard to believe, but having select few design equipment and processes that will then be used by much less skilled and paid workers is how most production companies work.

Now, I don't have any numbers. But if SpaceX is able to hire and maintain predominantly minority staff (assuming they are paid a reasonable wage) isn't it a win for those communities?

fwip• 4 years ago

I feel like Francisco Cabada probably doesn't count it as a win.

fayalargeau• 4 years ago

The company’s silence on the incident is a particularly dramatic reflection of a core dynamic in America’s new space race: The unspoken truth that human lives are at play at every level.

???? Does a company need to make an announcement or public statement for every incident that occurs at work?

There are risks at every job. How is this even an article-worthy?

fdgsdfogijq• 4 years ago

It gets clicks!

limaoscarjuliet• 4 years ago

And karma votes :-)

TylerE• 4 years ago

Maybe they should?

Already most companies do the absolute least OSHA lets them get away with (and often not even that...)

FL410• 4 years ago

What do you expect them to do, especially considering legal and healthcare/PHI constraints?

formerkrogemp• 4 years ago

Over the decade I worked in retail and warehouses prior to becoming an accountant, I never once saw an OSHA inspector.

trollied• 4 years ago

I'd imagine they're silent regarding it because 1) it's an active safety investigation 2) legal will be involved 3) it's frankly nobody else's business, seeing as it's a private business

fasthands92• 4 years ago

I mean #2 is obviously correct but that shouldn't make the public feel any better. Precisely because there are downsides (including legal and political) for announcing incidents they will only do so if they have to.

giarc• 4 years ago

3) it's frankly nobody else's business, seeing as it's a private business

It is however a private business taking public money. If a government was pumping millions of dollars into a company that was producing an unsafe work environment resulting in injury and death (not saying that is the case) but I think the public has a right to know.

BuyMyBitcoins• 4 years ago

”2) legal will be involved”

In court, an apology, even something as simple as saying “sorry”, can be used as an admission of guilt. It behooves them to say as little as possible.

tptacek3• 4 years ago

OSHA incidents probably don't fit the "nobody's business" pattern, in the same way major breaches like the one that happened at Uber don't.

KennyBlanken• 4 years ago

Workplace safety violations are absolutely society's "business."

p1necone• 4 years ago

frankly nobody else's business, seeing as it's a private business

Uhh, wut? How many people have to die inside a private business before it does become other peoples business. And how do you know if you've got your blinders on.

bell-cot3• 4 years ago

There are risks at every job. How is this even an article-worthy?

A sadly large % of the people reading news on-line have nearly forgotten that hazardous real-world jobs still exist. (Vs. office jobs where "fell and sprained wrist while getting out of an extra-comfy wheely chair" is just about the worst workplace injury they can imagine.)

Also, it's SpaceX. Loads of construction, roofing, etc. workers get maimed & killed every year, and are barely worth a passing mention in the local paper.

croes2• 4 years ago

It's not about the number but about the reason.

There is a difference if a job is dangerous and somebody gets hurt or dies despite compliance with all safety measures or if an accident happens because of safety violations.

mabbo3• 4 years ago

Because openness about failure is indicative of willingness to accept criticism. Doesn't mean they need to accept fault.

Being completely silent on the matter gives the appearance that they are pretending it didn't happen, that they want no one asking questions about it.

lazide2• 4 years ago

Or don’t want to provide meat for the legal meat grinder.

foverzar• 4 years ago

So, this basically serves no real purpose, other than keeping appearances and sending proper signals to bored strangers on the internet, affecting nothing at all.

s1artibartfast6• 4 years ago

What would be sufficient openness? What do you think they should be saying and to whom? Who should they be seeking and accepting criticism from?

Should Space X proactively issue notice to the media and request for public feedback?

Should they be emailing all employees details?

Should Elon be posting on twitter for feedback?

tester756• 4 years ago

If NASA would, then why SpaceX no?

yreg• 4 years ago

Internally they definitely should.

chinabot2• 4 years ago

The other dozen poor soles who probably died in work related accidents today don't count as they have nothing to do with Elon Musk.

chrisfosterelli4• 4 years ago

The article appears to use these individual cases to draw the conclusion that "speed and competitive pressure in the private space race make workplaces necessarily unsafe". While tragic, I don't know how a few individual cases can show that.

Is there any actual statistics that support that claim? The article says that at least 24 workers have been killed while in the space industry since 1980. Compare that to coal fatalities, of which there were nearly 2,000 fatalities over the same period.

SpaceX has 12,000 people and are making rockets so it seems like some degree of danger will be inherent. Of course this should be reduced where-ever possible, but if the claim is that the space industry is unnecessarily unsafe then I'm not sure that's convincing.

kelnos2• 4 years ago

if the claim is that the space industry is unnecessarily unsafe then I'm not sure that's convincing.

The claim is that it's necessarily unsafe. You even quoted that part.

chrisfosterelli4• 4 years ago

It is worded funny in the quote. In the context of the entire article, the author is clearly saying that the "speed and and competitive pressure" are the casual factor for it becoming unsafe (i.e., given the requirement of going fast by higher ups, it is necessary to be unsafe).

So he's implying that if they weren't so focused on speed and competitive pressure it could be more safe. There's where I get "unnecessarily unsafe" from, because in the author's perspective it's not necessary to prioritize speed and competition over safety. My point is that I don't think it's obviously unsafe at all, or at least could use some statistics to support his argument that it is.

duxup2• 4 years ago

Also had they followed established safety standards the incident focused on would not have happened.

That actually sounds like a mature and potentially safe industry.

ajross2• 4 years ago

This is an important point. We have regulators already working in this space, and OSHA and the like actually do a great job. When people mess up (and they do!) there's an existing bureaucracy to step in and force the companies to correct their processes. So it's entirely reasonable to feel that SpaceX is on the whole a safe industrial environment and that their OSHA fines were reasonable and just.

bsder• 4 years ago

Also had they followed established safety standards the incident focused on would not have happened.

Exactly.

I like to dump on Musk, but people disobey safety regulations all the time, and sometimes it bites them:

"Three Dead After Falling Into Molten Steel Pit" https://apnews.com/3c42c98020afcd458f1f49a861d0d87b

In this instance, the main culprit was the fact that they didn't dry out the mold properly which then cracked and leaked molten steel everywhere. However, people were not supposed to be standing on top of the cover plates during centrifugal caster operation.

There is a reason why you obey the safety regulations every single time.

nverno2• 4 years ago

The wording of that sentence threw me off, he wrote 'necessarily' but my mind heard unnecessarily as well. I think the gist of the article is more to bring attention to the technicians who carry out the dangerous work than to assign blame to the industry. I think the author meant, it's dangerous work, but necessary to get it done quickly to be competitive.

hn_throwaway_99• 4 years ago

Well, I interpreted that a little bit differently. The sentence was:

"speed and competitive pressure in the private space race make workplaces necessarily unsafe"

I took that as meaning "private space companies are moving too fast and cutting too many corners to keep their workplaces safe". Meaning the "necessarily" part is only because companies are choosing this speed (or, similarly, being forced to move at this speed because other companies are also moving too fast/cutting corners).

In other words, I think the author's intent is more damning than you are implying.

BurningFrog2• 4 years ago

A sample size of one is definite proof for anything I already think is true!

LightG2• 4 years ago

Anecdote or spot data is definitely evidence though!

guywithahat• 4 years ago

Nothing about this is because they're private. The faster you innovate, the more frequently you see accidents. For decades space programs were almost entirely government work and they suffered their fair share of accidents (in some cases like the soviets, considerably more). Conversely aviation is almost exclusively privately funded and one of the safest ways to travel is by air

ajross2• 4 years ago

The faster you innovate, the more frequently you see accidents.

Do you though? I mean, again this article only cites three, and if that's all there were that seems to me to be a very reasonable accident rate in heavy industrial environments. People get crushed by backhoes almost every week just digging foundations and paving roads!

monknomo• 4 years ago

aviation is not exactly a laissez-faire industry with private industry self-regulating...

Robotbeat3• 4 years ago

In fact, government programs like Shuttle had MORE fatalities (9 or 10 technician fatalities, although you can quibble with some of them) in fewer launches than Falcon/SpaceX (none).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spaceflight-related_ac...

throwaway7422• 4 years ago

Haven't we had more spaceflight related deaths than the Soviet Union + Russia?

croes2• 4 years ago

The measure for safety shouldn't be the number of employees or the number of casualties but how preventable an accident is and what is the reason why it could not be avoided.

merely-unlikely3• 4 years ago

That's the point of the OSHA investigation but number of casualties is a comparable metric in a way that "how preventable an accident is" is not.

Gordonjcp• 4 years ago

I don't know what the figures are for agricultural accidents in the US but in the UK they're roughly 20 times the fatality rate of *every other industry in the country combined*, with a pretty steady 40 deaths per year since 1980.

If the US accident rate is similar (let's be generous - I suspect it's worse) then a rough back-of-an-envelope calculation puts that at 8000 deaths per year, and *you don't even hear about that*.

madrox• 4 years ago

While I don't have numbers ready to cite, the steel industry is a superb analogue. It, too, is a hazardous production environment. It, too, has production rate as an OKR. I believe deaths in that industry used to measure in the thousands [1].

There's a history, at least in the US, of production rate correlating to fatality rate in certain hazardous industries. That said, one of the most famous steel CEOs (Paul O’Neill at Alcoa) put safety at the forefront and transformed the company and their production [2].

1: citation needed

2: https://www.forbes.com/sites/roddwagner/2019/01/22/have-we-l...

kurthr2• 4 years ago

But the steel industry has been doing the same thing (with largely the same facilities) for the last 50 years. The move to recycling and mini-mills is the biggest change in the last 40 years. The same is largely true of aluminum mills. You should be able to figure out how to make that safe, but you won't make anything, if you demand that everything be as safe the first time as it will be in industries, which are a century old.

TMWNN• 4 years ago

While I don't have numbers ready to cite, the steel industry is a superb analogue. It, too, is a hazardous production environment. It, too, has production rate as an OKR. I believe deaths in that industry used to measure in the thousands [1].

I recently read RAILWAY ADVENTURES AND ANECDOTES (1885) <https://www.gutenberg.org/files/31395/31395-h/31395-h.htm>, a collection of interesting moments from the first 50 years of railroads. Almost every page there is a mention of some fatal accident for passengers and crews (usually a boiler explosion, and/or a derailment), yet everyone seems very matter-of-fact about such things despite (or, rather, because of) their frequency.

ericd• 4 years ago

I think the rough part of that analogy is that steel is at a different stage in its lifecycle as a product. Some innovation, to be sure, but nothing like this pace. Here, iteration speed is paramount.

Perhaps SpaceX should move somewhat more slowly and focus more on safety, but I hope that people keep in mind that the only way to be perfectly safe is to do nothing with any risk, which in this case translates to making no real progress on rocketry. That comes with species-level risks.

And if you double the amount of stuff done for each iteration, it might increase production time by much more than double, or potentially make some of the more difficult things impossible, as focus and momentum is lost, and mental state decays more between iterations.

cafard• 4 years ago

When my father worked for Republic Steel (1958-1969) it had a very strong safety culture.

zzzeek2• 4 years ago

they were fined by OSHA for severe safety violations, and they are also compared to a competing space company that is doing much better on safety. The incident does not warrant apologism of SpaceX or any "whataboutist" comparisons to other industries.

chrisfosterelli4• 4 years ago

It's possible to both trust OSHA's findings and disagree with the article's assertion that the space industry in general is unsafe.

s1artibartfast6• 4 years ago

5 year Osha reported fatalities & serious injuries:

https://www.osha.gov/pls/imis/accidentsearch.search?acc_keyw...

Osha incident report for this incident:

https://www.osha.gov/pls/imis/establishment.inspection_detai...

gibolt• 4 years ago

I agree that it likely is a nothingburger, but I wonder what the ratio looks like. The coal industry was probably much more sizeable than the number of workers working on rockets.

lupire5• 4 years ago

24 workers have been killed while in the space industry

Non-competitive US Government incompetence killed 14 astronauts since 1980.

alfor• 4 years ago

We could compare against other industries.

I am also wondering how many died of old age or depression in NASA while they were testing and scrubbing and delaying again.

There is a risk to no progress and being overly cautious too.

giantg23• 4 years ago

What's the main point of this article? It seems like it's to question if we should go to space, but it uses a few examples of injury or death. How doe the accident rates compare to other things? Without that, it seems like there's nothing here.

"SpaceX has made no announcement to the public or to its workers about his status"

HIPAA and other legal compliance?

unethical_ban• 4 years ago

HIPAA!

rhd• 4 years ago

Is SpaceX a covered entity providing health care? If not, HIPAA is not at issue.

giantg23• 4 years ago

Ok, then Americans with disabilities or whatever.

The point is, most companies don't release this information and I believe there are legal reasons for that.

gnarbarian2• 4 years ago

This is incredibly sad, but accidents happen. This is a good example of the type of incident which leads to procedures and reforms which will erode the agility of the organization. It's entropy, and it happens to every org. This is a big reason why NASA has a hard time executing compared to spacex.

I really see this as part of the natural cycle of any org. Nimble companies grow, incidents happen, corruption happens, safeguards are put in place to prevent issues from recurring and before you know it, the company is no longer nimble.

azmarks• 4 years ago

Safeguards do not make a company less nimble and it's frankly embarrassing that people think that. We should not have to sacrifice people in the name of growth. And the thinking that it's ok to hurt people because it's a "natural cycle of any org" is ridiculous and should be ridiculed. Every company should have a culture of safety where accidents are investigated to determine what changes should be made to processes to ensure there is less harm if that type of accident happens again. That includes tech companies where an accident could be deleting a database or a space company where an accident is a pressure valve exploding.

gnarbarian2• 4 years ago

safeguards are always at odds with agility and latitude.

can you devise a safeguard for this incident which wouldn't negatively impact both of these concepts?

toomanyrichies• 4 years ago

SpaceX was fined $18,475 by OSHA for two safety violations, one of which was rated the highest penalty level of “serious” and a maximum gravity of 10.

Am I reading this right? One of the two safety violations was rated the maximum gravity of 10, yet could not have had a penalty of more than $18,475? That is not even couch money for a company the size of SpaceX. I really hope I'm missing some critical piece of info which makes this all make sense. Someone please assuage my concerns here.

malfist• 4 years ago

Sounds like the cost of doing business to me. Yeah, we might kill someone, but think of the profits we could make!

bombcar2• 4 years ago

A known OSHA violation that wasn't fixed rapidly will be an absolute win for discovery in a workplace injury/wrongful death suit.

thethirdone• 4 years ago

There is a maximum of $14,502 per violation. If you are trying to maintain a decently safe workplace, I think a that is probably roughly appropriate for a serious mistake in safety. I believe if you have many ways in which your workplace is unsafe it would build up pretty quick.

Willful or Repeated violations cost 10x more. And failing to fix something costs 14k per day.

Source: https://www.osha.gov/penalties

elil172• 4 years ago

OSHA penalties are laughably low. Willful and repeated violations only cost a maximum of $150k/per incident, while serious but non-willful/first time violations are capped at about $14k/incident. The real money can be in workers comp/lawsuits, but those damages are capped based on expected lifetime earnings or, if you're lucky, a multiple of expected lifetime earnings. What's really messed up is that courts typically use your demographics to calculate your expected lifetime earnings (e.g. if you're black you will get a smaller settlement than a white person because statistically black people earn less than the average person over their lifetimes). When I first read that I thought it could not possibly be true, that there had to be some vitiate that made it make sense, but it's just how it's typically done.

Globally, protections for blue collar workers are crap. The US actually has pretty good worker protections all things considered (like, even compared to Europe).

SoftTalker• 4 years ago

A $150K penalty could potentially ruin a small company. It's pocket change for SpaceX. Penalties should be proportionate to the assets or market cap of the offender, so that all offenders feel the same pain.

csallen3• 4 years ago

I took a minute to look. $14,502 is the highest fine for an accidental violation, however you can also be charged that amount per date for failure to fix the violation, and the penalty increases 10x to $145k for violations that are willful or repeated.

This seems fair-ish to me. Accidents happen, and we want to disincentivize them, but we want to disincentivize negligence even more. To make monetary disincentives effective, I would argue that it'd be better to assess penalties as a % of profit rather than as a flat fee, so big companies pay more than small companies. But we have the same issue with traffic citations. Someone rich pays the same speeding fee as someone poor, so it's not as effective as a disincentive.

More importantly, we should keep in mind that it's not like OSHA violations are the only possible monetary compensation. For example, SpaceX may be liable for a civil lawsuit from the victim or his family.

deepzn• 4 years ago

Should really also reflect the company involved. That is peanuts to SpaceX, fine should be in the millions. But, your point on possible civil lawsuits makes sense. As a legal fine, though for a corporation last worth $100B, not enough.

bell-cot3• 4 years ago

I would argue that it'd be better to assess penalties as a % of profit rather than as a flat fee, so big companies pay more than small companies.

On the day when that rule goes into effect, Wall Street's lawyers & financial engineers will have already shuffled all the even-slightly-risky jobs into a maze of little break-even subcontractors, shell companies, and subsidiaries.

lazide2• 4 years ago

So if the company doesn’t make a profit on paper, no penalties for OSHA violations? I can feel the reorganizations as we speak!

jjk1665• 4 years ago

It's worth noting a bigger company typically has more potential osha violations. A 10 person shop might be ruined by a single willful violation, but you have to screw up pretty bad to get that willful violation. On the otherhand if you have a 10,000 person company and only one or two things are wrong, you're clearly making a serious effort to comply. If the cost of a single violation scaled with company size, then in practice organizations above a certain level of complexity would just not be possible to operate. Maybe there is something to be said for discouraging overly large corporate entities that can't keep track of of all their constituent parts, but it's very different from a trust fund baby paying to turn off speed limits.

LeifCarrotson• 4 years ago

A serious violation is not the highest penalty level. It's the highest that you can get (are likely to get) on the first pass. If you don't correct the flaw in your operations, they can come back and give you a "Willful violation" which is an order of magnitude larger.

Serious or even willful OSHA penalties on the scale of $7,000 or $70,000 are pretty insignificant to a large-scale operation. However, OSHA citations, used as evidence of negligence in a lawsuit, are enormously significant.

That's why when OSHA gets involved at a jobsite, smart companies choose to immediately shut down the work in question until an outside contractor can verify that the flaw has been corrected. The OSHA inspector can be tasked with interviewing employees and getting court orders so that the courts can eventually shut down a facility, but you never, ever want it to go that far.

metadat3• 4 years ago

I don't follow, $7k-70k is still nothing to the likes of SpaceX. Why are human lives valued so little? Why aren't organization size and resources taken into account when computing the violation penalty amount?

csours4• 4 years ago

OSHA's primary purpose is not punitive. It is to ensure that organizations create and follow safety procedures. OSHA is not a silver bullet. Nothing is. Sometimes things just suck. I cannot assuage your concerns.

csours4• 4 years ago

Too late to edit this, sorry.

"Sometimes things just suck"

I don't want this to sound like normalizing a safety deficit. It's not OK. But the incident happened and that sucks. OSHA can't immediately fix things and that sucks. Punitive damages don't immediately fix things and that sucks; they add some motivation, but they don't directly fix anything.

JumpCrisscross3• 4 years ago

violations was rated the maximum gravity of 10, yet could not have had a penalty of more than $18,475

OSHA isn't a punitive organization. That said, OSHA violations frequently convert into civil damages. This seems fairer than the government getting a check.

Also, OSHA violations aren't restricted to safety incidents. Once an incident occurs, OSHA can go back and assess fines for each violation that didn't result in an injury.

kator• 4 years ago

While it is a sad story, it reminded me of a parallel issue with another "Race" for technology:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_core

mabbo3• 4 years ago

The key question that everyone, especially SpaceX, should be asking is why was it even possible to run the test while Cabada was in an unsafe place?

System and safety design- a topic that a rocketry company should be deeply familiar with- should lead us to solutions where bad things are exceedingly impossible. Where you have to be trying to cause an accident for it to happen. This should extend beyond the product being built itself, to the factory, to the R&D, to every part of the organization where danger exists.

And when failure occurs, it behooves you to shout from the rooftop that you messed up, and show the world how you're making changes so it can't happen again. Being quiet about the failure of your system makes it sound a lot like you aren't planning to make any changes to it.

It's a bad culture to start in a rocketry company.

happyopossum4• 4 years ago

The idea that every accident can be prevented by delight is a ridiculous and utopian trope, and to demonize an entire corporate culture and group of 12k employees without any background information is the height of hubris.

Nobody would ever design a ladder that cannot be climbed without a safety harness being properly worn, but many people are injured or killed in ladder accidents at workplaces every year. In your world that's a design failure, but out here in reality it's often carelessness or sheer bad luck.

karlmdavis• 4 years ago

To extend that line of argument a bit, what about a more professional tool/system, e.g. cherry pickers?

Doesn’t it seem reasonable to you to design and engineer cherry pickers such that the bucket can’t be moved unless a safety harness is attached?

toss1• 4 years ago

Do not make The Perfect an enemy of The Good.

Merely because some accidents still happen despite motivated and brilliant people working to prevent them does not mean that the effort should not be made.

You don't abandon the endeavor, but nor do you just throw caution to the winds.

The article had a great example of a competing space company with an evidently solid safety culture; an accident was reported, and inspection done, and zero issues were found (which is quite difficult to be good enough have an OSHA inspection find nothing of note)

> Relativity has a strong safety record relative to others in the industry, with just one OSHA safety inspection since it was founded in 2015. The inspection, spurred by an accident, did not result in a violation.

knome• 4 years ago

but out here in reality

This, I expect, is exactly the kind of bad cultural attitude that @mabbo was referring to. You're advocating for accidents as being an unavoidable cost of business while preemptively hand-waving them as being the fault of careless employees or fate.

As @P5fRxh5kUvp2th points out, there are established industry safety measures to avoid exactly these kinds of accidents when working around dangerous machinery, in the lockout/tagout system.

If tests are locked out while employees are tagged into an area, you can't accidentally smack them into a coma with an over-pressurized part blowing out. By requiring tag ins to access dangerous areas, you don't have to have employees remember someone is out there, or that a test is coming, or worry about anyone getting confused on either front.

Blaming the employee for being where they shouldn't be or the other for running tests when someone was nearby is a cop out. It shouldn't even be possible for it to happen at all.

Design your systems and processes to expect that humans are fallible.

bombcar2• 4 years ago

You replace ladders with scaffolding and cherry pickers or similar things, though those too can have their safety issues ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8YBxOA-aQQE )

I guarantee you that every job site manager in the WORLD can identify the unsafe employees, even if they're doing 'everything by the book'.

Some of it can be designed away (two-hand tools for example) but some of it is basically inherent.

P5fRxh5kUvp2th• 4 years ago

The key question that everyone, especially SpaceX, should be asking is why was it even possible to run the test while Cabada was in an unsafe place?

absolutely.

lockout/tagout may seem unnecessary, but it's specifically to avoid exactly these types of situations. Not is it not possible for someone to be in an unsafe place, it's not possible for miscommunications such that it BECOMES unsafe after the fact because that lockout is with a lock no one else can unlock except the person who did it.

It obviously requires humans actually DO the procedures, but I think that's part of the point with the question.

Jtsummers2• 4 years ago

lockout/tagout may seem unnecessary, but it's specifically to avoid exactly these types of situations. Not is it not possible for someone to be in an unsafe place, it's not possible for miscommunications such that it BECOMES unsafe after the fact because that lockout is with a lock no one else can unlock except the person who did it.

And despite many comments in this discussion thread asserting that safety reduces progress and speed, lockout/tagout and similar procedures reduce the number of accidents and mishaps. That leads to less downtime spent picking up the body parts or cleaning a corpse out of the equipment. This is one of those "slow is smooth, smooth is fast" things. Get into a good routine with good safety measures and you can get shit done instead of cleaning up shit.

mabbo3• 4 years ago

lockout/tagout may seem unnecessary, but it's specifically to avoid exactly these types of situations

Thank you! I was trying desperately to remember what that system is called but deleted that sentence from my reply because I had forgotten it!

AlexandrB• 4 years ago

Relevant quote from the article:

In the accident involving Cabada, OSHA’s accident investigation summary noted that “the final step in the pressure check operation, venting, was done for the first time using an automated program as opposed to the normal manual method that had been used in previous operations.”

s1artibartfast6• 4 years ago

"At 12:44 p.m. on January 18, 2022, an employee, an integration technician, was p erforming pneumatic pressure checks on a Raptor V2 Engine while at the Integrati on Stand. The final step in the pressure check operation, venting, was done for the first time using an automated program as opposed to the normal manual method that had been used in previous operations. Immediately after initiating the aut omated venting, the employee was struck by the fuel controller cover which broke free from the controller module. The controller cover had sheared at the vertic al to horizontal beveled seam, liberating the cover face from the assembly. The employee suffered a skull fracture and head trauma and was hospitalized in a com a for months."

https://www.osha.gov/pls/imis/establishment.inspection_detai...

It sounds like a number of things went wrong:

1) The automated program malfunctioned.

2) The controller cover welds failed.

3) The employee was too close.

jjk1665• 4 years ago

How are you supposed to know ahead of time that a place is unsafe? Cabada should have been perfectly safe where they were, but at least one safety system failed. Ultimately you can never completely eliminate danger, at best you can reduce risk below some rational threshold for failure modes you are already aware of.

And self flagellation after an accident does nothing to improve safety. Worse, it feels like you're doing something when you're not. Further, doing so right away leads to kneejerk reactions which might feel like an improvement but which are poorly suited for actually addressing the problem. The proper approach is to methodically investigate the issue, figure out what went wrong, and make appropriate, actionable changes. There is absolutely no reason to make a public announcement at any point in the process - safety is not a PR tactic.

masklinn2• 4 years ago

How are you supposed to know ahead of time that a place is unsafe? Cabada should have been perfectly safe where they were, but at least one safety system failed.

Any potentially unsafe location should be behind a LOTO / safety interlock, and you should not be able to access it without locking it.

krisoft3• 4 years ago

How are you supposed to know ahead of time that a place is unsafe?

I’m not even sure if you are asking this seriously. You make a safety assesment. People who do this kind of engineering task go through the systems methodically and they write up the dangers, hazards and the mitigations.

This is not some kind of new unheard of physics. This is not Gordon Freeman pushing an unusual crystal into an anti-mass spectrometer which results in headcrabs eating everyone who doesn’t have a crowbar. High pressure systems, cryogenics, flamable gasses and liquids all have known hazards and with proper systems and procedures they all can be mitigated.

Cabada should have been perfectly safe where they were, but at least one safety system failed.

I’m working from a very limited set of information but the article states he should not have been where he was during a test. If that is true we have processes to mitigate that risk. (Lockout-tagout) That is pretty standard really.

The proper approach is to methodically investigate the issue, figure out what went wrong, and make appropriate, actionable changes.

I agree with that.

There is absolutely no reason to make a public announcement at any point in the process - safety is not a PR tactic.

Sure. But not talking about incidents is a PR tactic. Asking the grieving family to remove a picture of the hurt worker which depicts him in context of his work is a PR tactic.

snowwrestler• 4 years ago

Meta-comment here, but it’s somewhat notable that this is the very first link submitted to HN from Semafor, which is a new media company started by Justin Smith, formerly of Bloomberg and The Atlantic, and Ben Smith, formerly of The NY Times and founding editor of Buzzfeed News.

And it hit the top of the front page—not bad for a first impression.

dredmorbius3• 4 years ago

Right. I'd not heard of the organisation previously and did some exploring.

The FT has a good background bit, also just released today. Paywall: <https://archive.ph/GkSjG>

crystaln• 4 years ago

Somebody got hurt so the space race is unsafe…

We should probably halt agriculture and cancel automobiles also.

Also all injuries need a press release.

csours4• 4 years ago

Accidents happen in non-capitalist contexts as well. Reaching for that as a cause without any evidence is weak.

Profit motive is like gravity - it's always there, in every society. It may have other names, like making your superior happy, but it's there.

You have to guard against profit motive weakening your core values - you have to put up guard rails. If those guard rails are missing, that's very bad. If those guard rails are there, and people avoiding them is normalized, that's very bad. If those guard rails are there, and people get in trouble for avoiding them, that's very bad.

If those guard rails are there, and you have a comprehensive process for reviewing incidents and updating rules and processes based on real world factors, then you're part of the way towards good safety culture.

Safety culture is the decisions that individual team members and teams make. Safety culture is also the corporate process for evaluating incidents. And also the way that resources are or are not assigned when concerns are raised. And so many other things.

ff317• 4 years ago

This is exactly where those lofty Mission + Values statements come into play and why they're important when they're both written and lived well (as opposed to just some bland generic screed made from corporate buzzword bingo terms that everyone ignores).

The Mission is what you're trying to achieve (the profit motive, in some form), and the Values are the guardrails. They say explicitly what things you won't sacrifice (like human rights and lives) in service of the mission.

Having this stuff laid out clearly from the top down helps a lot with getting efforts to create and enforce those lower level processes taken seriously.

csours4• 4 years ago

And when teams ask for resources to fix issues, they have to get those resources. Its all very well for an executive to say those lofty things, it also has to be funded.

Unfortunately, sometimes people in the middle just assume that saving money is more important; the CEO might have told them to allocate resources, but the request just got squashed along the way.

noasaservice• 4 years ago

https://revealnews.org/article/tesla-says-its-factory-is-saf...

"(In 2017) The rate of serious injuries, requiring time off or a work restriction, was 30 percent worse than the previous year’s industry average."

H8crilA• 4 years ago

BTW, there is only one job that is not subjected to ionising radiation exposure limits: the astronaut. Radiation in space is just too damn strong, there's not much that can be done about it without spending high multiples of what's already being spent for manned space travel.

Details: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_ionizing_radiation_...

londons_explore• 4 years ago

I'm really surprised there aren't more accidents at spacex...

They aren't following some well tested process that is well understood.

They're trying new things that might go wrong in unexpected ways. Yet somehow their accident rates are still low. That's pretty impressive.

hoseja• 4 years ago

Don't let that stop hack journos from writing hit pieces anyway!

squokko• 4 years ago

Of the thousands of US workplace deaths per year, I wonder why this workplace injury (serious, but not fatal) gets an entire article? Hmm...

93po2• 4 years ago

It's owned by the same person who owns a car company that makes headlines every time their cars catch fire after a serious accident. It's very irresponsible of El*n to make lithium batteries that are capable of igniting when punctured and destroyed.

martyvis• 4 years ago

I just heard an interview on ABC Radio with The Guardian journalist Anne Davies about safety issues during the construction of the Sydney Metro rail system here in Australia. Amongst other things a 30 tonne train carriage transporting equipment travelled 1.5km uncontrolled in a half built tunnel and an escalator being installed at an underground station fell 4 floors. Unfortunately accidents happen in all industries despite combined effort of regulators, companies and employees. https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2022/oct/18/out-o...

photochemsyn• 4 years ago

It's never a bad idea to compare a story like this to the overall work-related injury/fatality statistics:

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

There's the absolute number of events to consider, plus the overall rate of injury to consider, the latter being more of a risk estimate. Here are the top three by a fair margin (first number is total deaths, second is rate is per 100,000 full time employees in that sector, for the year 2020):

Construction: 1,008 10.2

Transportation and warehousing 805 13.4

Agriculture, forestry, fishing, and hunting 511 21.5

I don't see any breakdown in that data for the space industry, but that's the kind of information that would put this report in some kind of context.

ok_computer• 4 years ago

With high tech manufacturing you’d want to compare against mature higher risk industries such as oil and gas, chemical, pharmaceutical manufacturing, food manufacturing, and semiconductors, plus military noncombat operations and military contractors.

There are ideally engineering controls and standard operating procedures or documented deviations, even in research or pilot facilities. Construction and agriculture, apart from the design phase (like residential crafts, HVAC, industrial electricians or cement etc) do not have the same workplace standards as an industrial facility or field site with cohabitation of engineering, operations, and contractors. There are always exceptions with safe contractors and bad facilities.

If you are routinely testing a pressure relief valve and there is not a documented procedure around this or a permit addressing limiting exposure to that energy that might be a problem in retrospect. Ideally, industries would operate in good faith of regulations and not just outside the envelope of punitive measures. But regulatory stuff is complicated and specific depending on location. I simply wanted to point out it would be helpful to compare incident statistics against common risk profile industries.

AtlasBarfed• 4 years ago

"Safe" jobs like cube farms where people don't exercise and destroy their neuromuscular systems over time?

And the death rate is unlikely to be worse than: crab fishing, mining, petroleum extraction, manufacturing, etc.

and... "semafor"? Never heard of this. This article reeks of "popular hotbutton company" + "drama" to drive clicks.

The real issue is lack of universal healthcare of course.

dredmorbius3• 4 years ago

Semafor is a new media venture which launched today. Its founders have strong former experience.

See: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33252667>

groby_b• 4 years ago

So, the worst possible violation costs you $18K?

I suppose you can afford a few of them if you're SpaceX. (Especially the way they pay - your salary comes pre-reduced for several violations/year)

billiam• 4 years ago

Appalling tone of conversation. Comparing a multibillion dollar high tech company's workplace safety procedures to street violence in poor parts of the US or in mechanized agriculture is insulting. SpaceX has tried to ignore this tragedy and their silence and opaqueness about it mean nothing will be learned that could prevent the next disaster.

93po2• 4 years ago

Could you talk more in depth about your experience with the safety processes that exist at SpaceX, and how the events around TFA had an impact on safety at SpaceX? Were you part of the team that investigated directly or did you only see the results of the internal investigation second hand? Can you tell me about which processes you'd specifically like to see impacted and how they fit into the workflow at hand?

I'm interested to hear the data and information that went into your opinion that nothing will change.

kens• 4 years ago

I've always been sad for John Bjornstad and Forrest Cole who died in a Space Shuttle test in 1981 when they entered a nitrogen-filled compartment. Since they were workers and not astronauts, they are treated as footnotes and not heroes.

LightG2• 4 years ago

Stop groaning and get back to work!!!

alsodumb• 4 years ago

"Relativity has a strong safety record relative to others in the industry, with just one OSHA safety inspection since it was founded in 2015. The inspection, spurred by an accident, did not result in a violation."

Yeah sure, let's called Relativity safe while totally ignoring the fact that they have a team of 700 (compared to 12,000 at SpaceX), spent bulk of the last seven years working on 3D printing rocket parts taking VC money (unlike SpaceX, which rose to the leading and in some cases only launch provider in US), and never launched a rocket as of today.

Oh and Relativity still had one OSHA inspection, where as SpaceX had a total of 5 health and safety violations since 2014.

Perhaps the author needs to calibrate his mental picture of safety before calling Relativity relatively safe.

awad• 4 years ago

I'm not sure if it's because this is a particular engineering-learning crowd that is pro space or SpaceX or something else but the general lack of empathy toward a human being who has suffered is concerning when reading this thread, especially when you consider that this was in fact a very serious injury that could have been prevented with an appropriate adherence to safety protocol.

Move fast and break things was a terrible mantra but it seems to have seeped in...or perhaps was always there.

bottlepalm• 4 years ago

Your empathy has you blinded to the real motive here, the author doesn’t give a damn about the person. ‘Move fast and break things’ which the article has made you believe that means human safety. Now that you’ve taken the bait it’s time to spread your misinformation to your friends. Maybe make some tweets. That’s how the media controls you and the narrative.

uni_rule• 4 years ago

If the history of avation is anything to go by, the incredibly stringent safety guidelines everybody must follow is not out of the goodness of their hearts but rather written by legislators in the blood of crash victims. The fact that NASA actually treats it's humans as not expendable must be the exception to the rule then. These companies won't mind literally shredding people to proceed faster than their competition unless they are actively forced not to. Having no regard for safety is a competitive advantage if the time saved allows a leg up over all competitors in such a fast moving market. Truly any concerns over a complete flippant ignorance of having safety procedures can be drowned out by an army of fanboys going "it's worth it because space" for free if everyone lets them.

mensetmanusman2• 4 years ago

Just gave a talk at MIT and we discussed with the students how the hacking culture is essentially gone there due to the safety-at-all-costs mindset seeping into America.

In my opinion, it’s partly due to being an aging society. (1960 median age ~ 29, today it is around 39). Young people are generally more willing to be risky and try new things, and since the adults have all the power and are more litigious, of course we will end up ruled by rules and regulations that only get more complicated and time consuming.

Our society has never been safer, but we have used that comfort to be incredibly unhealthy/obese as well. Interesting times (possibly more boring times to come).

An Accident at SpaceX

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