[nickik]

You are comparing people that work on small sats to people who work on the largest rocket in human history.

McGregor is the most active rocket engine test facility in the world.

How are their insure rates compared 'per rocket engine test' with other places that test large rocket engines. But again, most of those are tiny rocket engines being test, so how about we look at insure per unit of thrust tested.

> The company’s facility in Redmond, Washington, had a rate of 0.8, the same as the industry average.

And what is the rate per sat produced compared to others?

[justinclift]

> And what is the rate per sat produced compared to others?

That feels a bit um... unethical to suggest as a good measure? :(

Along the lines of "we produce more stuff, so cutting corners on worker safety is ok".

[nickik]

> Along the lines of "we produce more stuff, so cutting corners on worker safety is ok".

Well but that really isn't it.

Its more like doing X has some inherent danger and if you do more of X then its likely more people are gone be insured. So comparing to some 'industry avg' in an industry that also includes people building cube-sats compared to the most powerful rocket engine isn't really fair.

And I wasn't suggesting this to say what SpaceX is doing is inherently ok (I don't know enough) but to establish better comparative baselines.

Then we can actually figure out if SpaceX is more unsafe or simply does more dangerous activity.

[bryanlarsen]

Any company who actually produces real world items is going to have a higher injury rate than a company whose primary output is TPS reports.

[justinclift]

That's not self evident though. Do you have supporting evidence for your claim?

[bryanlarsen]

SpaceX launches about 100X as much stuff to orbit as all other American launch companies combined.

[justinclift]

Sure, that's a good amount of stuff.

But that's not really got anything to do with injury rates yeah?

[nickik]

Actually it does. If you assume that doing some a difficult dangerous task like, testing a rocket engine, building a building sized rocket or launching a rocket is inherently dangerous, and no amount of safety will get the injury rate to 0.

So if a company only does 5 engine test and 1 launch a year and has 10 injuries, then that is inherently worse then a company that does 1000 engine tests and 100 launches but has 20 injuries.

Or do you disagree?