What Spacex has achieved with Starship is incredible. The only problem is that he has done it at the expense of the health of his employees

Spacex has no paragon. The speed at which it assembles its rockets, the tests and itera in its design is far from the competition. But it comes with a hidden cost: a rate of injuries that multiplies by four of its rivals and reminds the security figures of 30 years ago.

Context. Starbase is the Starship operations basethe place where the Aerospace Company of Elon Musk manufactures and proves the gigantic Rocket Starship with the ambition to launch thousands of ships to Mars in the coming decades.

Although the program has achieved unthinkable technological feats, its frantic rhythm and its vertiginous deadlines are having a high human cost, especially if the risks assumed by Spacex are compared with the usual caution of the space industry.

Six times more work accidents. Official data analyzed by Techcrunch They reveal that Starbase suffers six times more occupational accidents than the industry average, which makes it the rocket factory with the highest risk of injury in the United States.

The Spacex headquarters registered a rate of injuries that multiplies by four of its rivals and resembles the figures of 30 years ago, when the security protocols were more lax.

The figures are public. They leave The database of the United States Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA) and use a standardized metric: the total rate of registrable incidents (TRIR), which calculates the number of injuries in one year per 100 full -time workers. Are public data that Spacex is obliged to report.

And they are overwhelming. Starbase’s trir in 2023 was 5.9. That is, for every 100 employees, there were almost six recordable injuries. In comparison, the average of the space vehicle manufacturing sector was 0.7. And the average of the entire space sector was 1.6.

A 30 -year setback. Although Starbase’s trir improved 4.27 in 2024, it is still a fact comparable to that of the sector 30 years ago. In 1994, the average trir was 4.2. In Starbase, with 2,690 employees in 2024, more than four injuries per 100 employees was 3,558 days of work with restrictions and 656 days of low labor.

Anomalous even within Spacex. Starbase is not only a black point compared to the rest of the industry, but also within Spacex itself. None of the company’s facilities approaches the figures in southeastern Texas, with the exception of risky rocket recovery operations on the high seas (with a 7.6 trir).

While Starbase registered 4.27 in 2024, the Falcon rocket factory in Hawthorne (California) recorded 1.43. A figure closer to that of competitors such as Blue Origin (a 1.09 in its Florida factory) or United Launch Alliance (1.12 in his Alabama factory). On the other hand, Starlink Terminal Factory in Bastrop registered 3.49, the Redmond satellit factory registered 2.89, the McGregor engines factory recorded a 2.48.

Move fast and break things. Elon Musk’s philosophy works when applied to rockets, but squeaks when applied to the safety of his workers. What does Musk say? That the traditional media lie. Or at least that said when Reuters published that Spacex had not declared injuries that included amputations, crushed members and a death For a burst of wind that launched a worker from a truck.

What does NASA say? NASA contracts with Spacex They include specific clauses that would allow the agency to intervene in case of a “serious security violation”, as a “repeated” sanction by the OSHA. The high trir rate, alone, is not enough to activate these clauses.

Image | Spacex

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