[HN Gopher] An Accident at SpaceX
___________________________________________________________________
An Accident at SpaceX
Author : alphabetting
Score : 243 points
Date : 2022-10-18 14:06 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.semafor.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.semafor.com)
| fayalargeau wrote:
| > 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?
| mabbo wrote:
| 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.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| 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?
| lazide wrote:
| Or don't want to provide meat for the legal meat grinder.
| foverzar wrote:
| 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.
| bell-cot wrote:
| > 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.
| croes wrote:
| 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.
| bell-cot wrote:
| Reasonable Assumption: A whole lot of the barely-covered
| injuries and deaths at various little tree-trimming,
| construction, roofing, etc. firms also involve safety
| violations.
| fdgsdfogijq wrote:
| It gets clicks!
| limaoscarjuliet wrote:
| And karma votes :-)
| johndfsgdgdfg wrote:
| And satisfaction that you are one of those few people who
| not only care about human lives, also actively fights a
| billions of dollar worth megacorp.
| TylerE wrote:
| Maybe they should?
|
| Already most companies do the absolute least OSHA lets them get
| away with (and often not even that...)
| formerkrogemp wrote:
| Over the decade I worked in retail and warehouses prior to
| becoming an accountant, I never once saw an OSHA inspector.
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| My impression is that OSHA tends to be reactive.
|
| Unless there was an incident or a report of unsafe activity
| you aren't going to see OSHA.
| FL410 wrote:
| What do you expect them to do, especially considering legal
| and healthcare/PHI constraints?
| heavyset_go wrote:
| SpaceX is not a covered entity under HIPAA, they are under
| no PHI constraints that healthcare providers are under.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| trollied wrote:
| 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
| p1necone wrote:
| > 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.
| fasthands9 wrote:
| 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.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _that shouldn 't make the public feel any better_
|
| The incident was reported to a federal agency. I'm not sure
| I'd want my medical history publicly aired if I were
| injured at work.
| fasthands9 wrote:
| https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-the-cabadas-during-this-
| diff...
|
| The family started a public GoFundme page. I think its
| clear that it is in the interest of both the family and
| labor at large to get stories about workplace injuries to
| the public.
| elsonrodriguez wrote:
| It's interesting to note that the family has changed the
| main picture to remove any overt SpaceX references.
| BuyMyBitcoins wrote:
| >"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.
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| Workplace safety violations are absolutely society's
| "business."
| tptacek wrote:
| 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.
| shortstuffsushi wrote:
| Is this meant to say, if it's an OSHA involved incident, it
| should be made public knowledge?
| tptacek wrote:
| I'd remove the word "should". OSHA incidents create
| public records. They are, by definition, our business.
| shortstuffsushi wrote:
| I was not actually aware these incidents were made public
| record, so TIL. For this specific instance, here is a
| link for any interested. https://www.osha.gov/pls/imis/es
| tablishment.inspection_detai...
| tptacek wrote:
| Essentially all public functions that create records
| create, by definition, public records. There are
| exceptions, but they're much narrower than you'd expect.
| You're entitled to demand copies of the records that
| federal agencies collect, and those records are created
| with the expectation that they can be produced on demand.
| Most agencies do a reasonable job of making things
| overtly public, so you can just download them. But even
| if they don't, you can just FOIA them.
| giarc wrote:
| >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.
| googlryas wrote:
| That's OSHA's job, not SpaceX's. And I don't think you can
| take a single incident and use that to determine if a
| workplace is safe or not. Especially considering the
| context of it being a rocket factory.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| I pump money into a lot of local businesses, and yet they
| never send me workplace safety reports.
| yreg wrote:
| Internally they definitely should.
| tester756 wrote:
| If NASA would, then why SpaceX no?
| chinabot wrote:
| 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.
| alsodumb wrote:
| "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 5 health and safety violations since 2014.
|
| Perhaps the author needs to calibrate his mental picture of
| safety before calling Relativity relatively safe.
| groby_b wrote:
| 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)
| giantg2 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| HIPAA!
| rhd wrote:
| Is SpaceX a covered entity providing health care? If not, HIPAA
| is not at issue.
| giantg2 wrote:
| 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.
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| The legal reason isn't that they aren't allowed to, it is
| that it can only hurt them.
|
| Why would a company highlight failures if they don't have
| to? Especially when their statements can later be used
| against them in civil or criminal proceedings.
| scrumbledober wrote:
| This is the company that released a video of a bunch of
| their rockets exploding, "How not to land an orbital
| rocket booster". They are usually pretty open with their
| failures, at least in engineering.
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvim4rsNHkQ
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| I guess I didn't specify that "failure of an experimental
| rocket for a company developing new rockets" is a
| different category than "failure of workplace safety
| procedures that permanently disables a family man"
|
| I thought the difference was clear
| giantg2 wrote:
| I'm almost certain that FMLA, ADA, etc have provisions
| that require the employer to treat the information as
| confidential. Even things like contact tracing for covid
| keeps the person anonymous.
| gnarbarian wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| gnarbarian wrote:
| 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?
| snowwrestler wrote:
| 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.
| noasaservice wrote:
| 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."
| toomanyrichies wrote:
| > 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.
| thethirdone wrote:
| 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
| elil17 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| elil17 wrote:
| I agree with this. The penalties should be sized such that
| every company feels that safety is their top priority
| without any company being driven out of business for a
| properly addressed accident.
| csallen wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| jjk166 wrote:
| 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.
| bell-cot wrote:
| > 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.
| csallen wrote:
| Yeah that kind of stuff is always going to happen. It's
| super tough to plug every single loophole and stop every
| single infraction, so we have to accept that that's not the
| goal. Hell, when you make murder illegal, murders commit
| their crimes in secret. Still, you accomplish the goal of
| making it much less common, and that's a win.
| lazide wrote:
| So if the company doesn't make a profit on paper, no
| penalties for OSHA violations? I can feel the reorganizations
| as we speak!
| csallen wrote:
| I mean you could pretty easily do a minimum amount plus a
| percentage. We're just talking about the upper limits here,
| the maximum fines.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _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.
| malfist wrote:
| Sounds like the cost of doing business to me. Yeah, we might
| kill someone, but think of the profits we could make!
| bombcar wrote:
| A known OSHA violation that wasn't fixed rapidly will be an
| absolute win for discovery in a workplace injury/wrongful
| death suit.
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| 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.
| metadat wrote:
| I don't follow, $7k-70k is still nothing to the likes of
| SpaceX. Why are human lives valued so little? Why aren't
| organization size and resources taken into account when
| computing the violation penalty amount?
| chroma wrote:
| If you fine too much, you change the incentives to
| prioritize cover-ups and legal fights. OSHA's goal is to
| reduce the likelihood of workplace injuries. That usually
| means working with the companies and employees, not
| imposing ruinous fines that result in layoffs or factory
| closures.
| metadat wrote:
| Got it, different from the goal and motivation behind
| GDPR, for example.
|
| Thank you, chroma.
| csours wrote:
| OSHA's primary purpose is not punitive. It is to ensure that
| organizations create and follow safety procedures. OSHA is not
| a silver bullet. Nothing is. Sometimes things just suck. I
| cannot assuage your concerns.
| csours wrote:
| Too late to edit this, sorry.
|
| > "Sometimes things just suck"
|
| I don't want this to sound like normalizing a safety deficit.
| It's not OK. But the incident happened and that sucks. OSHA
| can't immediately fix things and that sucks. Punitive damages
| don't immediately fix things and that sucks; they add some
| motivation, but they don't directly fix anything.
| crystaln wrote:
| Somebody got hurt so the space race is unsafe...
|
| We should probably halt agriculture and cancel automobiles also.
|
| Also all injuries need a press release.
| moffkalast wrote:
| Nothing says America quite as much as a company effectively
| killing a person with impunity, leaving their family to be
| propped up by a gofundme in order to not become homeless beggars.
| ArnoVW wrote:
| Just because they got a 'penalty' of 18k$ does not mean that
| they did not pay liability.
| dang wrote:
| Please don't start nationalistic flamewars, or any flamewars,
| on HN.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| photochemsyn wrote:
| 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.
| martyvis wrote:
| 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...
| kator wrote:
| 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
| chrisfosterelli wrote:
| 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.
| kelnos wrote:
| > _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.
| chrisfosterelli wrote:
| 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.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| There will always be risk/development tradeoff. You can
| play with the balance but the only way to bring it to zero
| is to stop development.
|
| That's not to say that improvements can't be made. The real
| question is how many of the injuries and deaths were
| preventable by following the guidelines that already exist,
| and are generally followed but not perfectly followed.
| duxup wrote:
| In the main example sounds like they didn't follow the
| safety rules that already exist / should have been
| followed.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| I agree. If the majority of your business and industry is
| following the safety standards, then it shouldn't cost
| much time to increase compliance in a rare few occasions.
|
| This is why I don't think the argument that development
| is too fast holds water.
|
| On the other hand, if the company were flagrantly
| ignoring safety standards in their process, yes, it would
| slow it down.
| duxup wrote:
| 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.
| ajross wrote:
| 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.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| I think that's fair. It's worth noting that there are no
| shortage of NASA-related technician deaths. SpaceX already
| has 12,000, overall more employees than NASA and
| contractors at KSC and Cape Canaveral, and yet has no fatal
| incidents. That's evidence to me that SpaceX, while it can
| improve more, has no worse safety than has been common
| overall in this industry. I think claims about how the
| industry is going "too fast" because they're private miss
| the mark. SpaceX does some things that improve safety over
| the status quo, such as automating testing. Using automated
| stacking of the Starship stages (instead of labor intensive
| manual stacking) is potentially a big improvement.
|
| Consider that there have been about 9 or 10 worker
| fatalities due to the Shuttle program (not counting the
| astronauts) in 135 flights of Shuttle vs zero SpaceX
| fatalities in nearly 200 Falcon launches, and I think it's
| clear that finger wagging about private space "going too
| fast" is missing the mark. It's actually possible that the
| slow practices of traditional contractors contributed to
| some of these deaths whereas the modern automation-driven
| SpaceX approach has limited fatalities.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spaceflight-
| related_ac...
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| 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...
| guywithahat wrote:
| 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
| monknomo wrote:
| aviation is not exactly a laissez-faire industry with private
| industry self-regulating...
| Robotbeat wrote:
| 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...
| lupire wrote:
| Plus 14 astronauts, at least half of which were because the
| government management overruled engineering because they
| wanted the PR of a successful launch (and didn't get it).
| ajross wrote:
| > 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!
| morelisp wrote:
| I imagine there are at least two orders of magnitude more
| construction workers (and backhoes) than rocket builders
| (and rockets).
| dylan604 wrote:
| At the rate SpaceX is hurling rockets up, that might not
| hold true for long! ;-O
| throwaway742 wrote:
| Haven't we had more spaceflight related deaths than the
| Soviet Union + Russia?
| lupire wrote:
| And 10x the amount of spaceflight?
| nverno wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| nverno wrote:
| Right, I meant necessary from the companies perspective.
| The author was certainly bringing to question the necessity
| of the industry from the broader perspective, his reference
| to Gil Scott Heron's song couldn't have made that clearer.
| icambron wrote:
| This is surely right. You wouldn't use "necessarily" here
| to mean, like, "justifiably". It means that it is a direct
| consequence of "moving too fast and cutting too many
| corners", as opposed to an orthogonal safety lapse that can
| be shored up without changing the underlying circumstances.
| Inexorably.
|
| Not to say the article is correct about this, of course.
| Maursault wrote:
| I'm not crazy about the way the author is using "speed"
| here. The word is not only doing a lot of heavy-lifting, it
| is ambiguous because rockets can't be slow. "Rushing" or
| "hurrying" would be less ambiguous yet not as peremptory. I
| think using "haste" would be unambiguous yet still transmit
| some imperativeness.
| [deleted]
| zzzeek wrote:
| 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.
| chrisfosterelli wrote:
| It's possible to both trust OSHA's findings and disagree with
| the article's assertion that the space industry in general is
| unsafe.
| zzzeek wrote:
| it's a funny sentence in the article everyone is picking
| apart, of course the space industry is not _necessarily_
| unsafe, the point seemed to be, and I may be misreading it,
| that the space industry _happens_ to be more unsafe than it
| needs to be due to the competitive incentives at play.
| chrisfosterelli wrote:
| Yes, I agree that's the point, and that's the point I
| disagree with. I don't think that the article contains
| robust evidence that the space industry as a whole
| happens to be more unsafe than it needs to be. It focuses
| on a single case study and cites what would generally be
| small accident numbers in any other industry. While this
| case is tragic, I think more evidence is necessary to
| establish the trend that the article is attempting to
| show.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| A sample size of one is definite proof for anything I already
| think is true!
| croes wrote:
| 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-unlikely wrote:
| 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.
| lupire wrote:
| Well, if someone refused to follow an established standard,
| that's preventable.
| leeoniya wrote:
| > at least 24 workers have been killed while in the space
| industry since 1980
|
| that's a typical weekend in Chicago
| gibolt wrote:
| 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.
| Gordonjcp wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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...
| kurthr wrote:
| 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.
| dboreham wrote:
| Aerospace industry is 120 years old.
| lupire wrote:
| Are you referring to the infamous Wright Brothers rocket
| ship?
| kccqzy wrote:
| By that logic the steel industry is 4000 years old.
| kurthr wrote:
| Well, it was certainly a lot more dangerous then:
|
| https://youtu.be/ZNAHcMMOHE8?t=395 : A trip to the moon
| 1901
|
| But seriously, the point is that the techniques and
| facilities are not changing, which is blatantly not true
| of reusable meth-ox rockets. Or you can just say we'll
| stick to Saturn Vs to get to space.
| ericd wrote:
| 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.
| TMWNN wrote:
| >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.
| lupire wrote:
| > 24 workers have been killed while in the space industry
|
| Non-competitive US Government incompetence killed 14 astronauts
| since 1980.
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| "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.
| billiam wrote:
| 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.
| LegitShady wrote:
| its clickbait fake scandal at spacex. The only thing it could do
| better is mention elon musk personally so hackernews can get
| their 2 minutes of hate in.
| yreg wrote:
| and blockchain! :)
| sohmsucks wrote:
| csours wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| csours wrote:
| 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.
| H8crilA wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| squokko wrote:
| Of the thousands of US workplace deaths per year, I wonder why
| this workplace injury (serious, but not fatal) gets an entire
| article? Hmm...
| mabbo wrote:
| 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.
| P5fRxh5kUvp2th wrote:
| > 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.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| > 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.
| ok_dad wrote:
| You don't even need to slow down, in some cases. I was
| watching a video[0] about how shinkansen trains are
| serviced each day, and noticed at one point[2] when the
| workers are ready to clean the top of the train they do a
| "point and call"[1] routine at a gate. Now, I am not
| exactly sure what the purpose is for that, because there
| isn't much context in the video, but I am logically
| assuming that they are checking that the train's overhead
| wires are depowered, and the gate probably only allows
| itself to be opened when that is the case. Even if that's
| not the exact reason here, I could imagine a test facility
| where you had occupancy sensors inside and a lockout gate
| that operated in this fashion, and wouldn't allow a human
| to be inside the room while pressure was increased in the
| test valve. I honestly don't get the cowboy attitude in
| here, we can progress to space quickly AND safely.
|
| [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ieRwRS0VUUM
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pointing_and_calling
|
| [2]: https://youtu.be/ieRwRS0VUUM?t=578
| wahern wrote:
| The Shinkansen services claim zero _passenger_ fatalities
| (and close to zero passenger injuries, on account of a
| recent mishap). If you carefully parse the language of
| these claims, taking note to discount those ineptly
| rephrasing official claims, these statistics usually _do_
| _not_ include workers. Here 's a paper discussing how
| those trains are cleaned:
| https://siliconflatirons.org/wp-
| content/uploads/2018/04/Trou... Exhibit 10, page 11 shows
| the number of employee accidents for the years 2001-2005.
| No year had zero. 2004 and 2005 were as high as 18
| employee accidents.
|
| Here's a fatality from just last year during tunnel
| construction for a maglev line:
| https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2021/10/29/national/jr-
| tun...
| lolc wrote:
| There's a section in the article relating the procedure
| of spraying the pressurized engine with a liquid to check
| for bubbles. The bubbles indicate leaks. Humans go close
| to the engine to check for leaks. They can point and call
| all they want, it is inherently unsafe for them to be
| there. It is unclear to me how that procedure could be
| replaced and I won't dismiss it as cowboy attitude.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| It's SpaceX, sister company of Tesla. They can have a
| small bot that goes around spraying and many cameras and
| other sensors observing. And given they're looking for
| potentially very small leaks from a pressurized system
| you wouldn't want a person physically present when the
| leak is discovered at high pressure anyways, not unless
| you want to see the effect of a very narrow high pressure
| stream hitting human skin (or a fast moving piece of
| hardware hitting their skull).
| mabbo wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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."
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| _" 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.
| jjk166 wrote:
| 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.
| krisoft wrote:
| > 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.
| masklinn wrote:
| > 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.
| jjk166 wrote:
| All locations are potentially unsafe locations. An
| interlock prevents people from being in a place they aren't
| supposed to be, it does nothing for when something goes
| wrong in a place you are supposed to be. You can take
| precautions to reduce the odds of something bad happening
| at the place you are supposed to be, but there's always
| something else that can go wrong.
| happyopossum wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| knome wrote:
| >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.
| chinabot wrote:
| Impossible. Humans will find a way to bypass anything.
| vkou wrote:
| > 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.
|
| This needs seconding. It's ridiculous to say that we can't
| demonize an entire company of 12,000 people, and in the
| same breath, turn around to demonize the _line workers_ of
| that company.
|
| It's no less ridiculous to instead demonize the _line
| workers that got hurt_ , which seems to be both post-facto
| cherrypicking, and victim blaming.
| toss1 wrote:
| 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.
| happyopossum wrote:
| > Do not make The Perfect an enemy of The Good.
|
| That's all well and good, but you also can't demonize an
| entire culture based on unrealistic navel-gazing. It's
| entirely possible this was a process or design problem that
| could have been prevented, but it's also possible that it's
| not - pretending you know based on few details in a one-
| sided article is pretty silly.
| krisoft wrote:
| > pretending you know based on few details in a one-sided
| article is pretty silly
|
| No. It is not. There is one telling detail in the
| article. SpaceX was fined by OSHA. That pretty much means
| in itself that there were things SpaceX shoulf have done
| which they didn't.
|
| We can't and won't do each our own investigation. Nobody
| believes that the article has enough details to decide
| the case on its merrits. But we know that someone
| professional did the investigation and found the company
| violated the safety norms. That is what we have these
| agencies for.
| happyopossum wrote:
| > SpaceX was fined by OSHA
|
| We don't know what for, or if the fined offense would
| have prevented this accident.
| merely-unlikely wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Though the article says "highest penalty level,"
| according to OSHA's website had the violation been
| "Willful or Repeated" it would have resulted in up to a
| $145k fine[1].
|
| [1] https://www.osha.gov/penalties
| merely-unlikely wrote:
| Considering Relativity hasn't actually launched a rocket
| yet (they are aiming for first launch this year), they are
| more a _prospective_ competitor.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| It's worth noting that SpaceX has about 20 times the number
| of employees as Relativity and Relativity has not yet
| launched anything to orbit whereas Falcon has over 180
| flights. I don't think we can objectively say the culture
| at Relativity is objectively safer yet. Relativity is also
| an extremely new company in comparison to SpaceX.
| bombcar wrote:
| 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.
| metadat wrote:
| Accepting at face value the claim that "every job site
| manager on earth" really can identify the "unsafe
| employees", then these managers are negligent and thus
| culpable for the failed outcomes.
|
| An infinitely better course of action is to ban all known-
| unsafe employees from operating in the risky path. Workers
| who unnecessarily put themselves and everyone else in
| jeopardy have no business being in the path.
|
| With that said, I'm highly skeptical about the veracity of
| this claim. Human behavior is fundamentally unstable,
| oscillating in the continuity spectrum between stable and
| erratic. However, the amount of variability for a given
| individual tends to be stable, which may be what you are
| saying a _good and effective manager_ should be able to
| catch.
|
| Regardless, humans are wetware and fundamentally error
| prone. Best to account for this element of our nature in
| the larger system design.
| karlmdavis wrote:
| 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?
| happyopossum wrote:
| > 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?
|
| No - that seems unreasonable too, as there's no reasonable
| way for the cherry picker to know if the harness is being
| worn by anyone, so it's just safety theater.
| kens wrote:
| 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.
| alfor wrote:
| 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.
| stytchwhy wrote:
| carabiner wrote:
| 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.
| adolph wrote:
| What's wrong with folks who live in "the roughest
| neighborhoods" being "in charge of precision assembly of human
| transport?"
| bell-cot wrote:
| > What's wrong with...?
|
| Snap answer: The hellish cost of even bottom-end housing in
| California, obviously.
| xwdv wrote:
| It is a testament to the engineers that even with such
| compromised workers, everything can still be built to highly
| precise tolerances.
| imadethis wrote:
| What makes these workers "compromised" in your view?
| xwdv wrote:
| Overworked, underpaid, stressful living situations.
| Sometimes even loosely trained.
| thorncorona wrote:
| I don't feel like compromised is the right word here?
| kbelder wrote:
| More of a testament to the workers.
| twawaaay wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I feel like Francisco Cabada probably doesn't count it as a
| win.
| twawaaay wrote:
| Hire enough people to work around dangerous things and you
| _will_ get accidents.
|
| The question really is whether the company is reasonably
| trying to prevent unnecessary risks and react with changes
| when accidents happen.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _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
| LightG wrote:
| Stop groaning and get back to work!!!
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