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SpaceX worker injury rates at Starbase outpace industry rivals
SpaceX employees are more likely to be injured while working at Starbase than any of its other manufacturing facilities, according to company worker safety records reviewed by TechCrunch.
Starbase, a sprawling launch-and-manufacturing site that recently incorporated as its own Texas city, logged injury rates almost six times higher than the average for comparable space vehicle manufacturing outfits and nearly three times higher than aerospace manufacturing as a whole in 2024, according to Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) data released in May. That outsized injury rate has persisted since 2019, when SpaceX began sharing Starbase injury data with the federal regulator.
Starbase is home to SpaceX’s most ambitious program: a fully reusable, ultra-heavy-lift rocket called Starship. The company has been moving at a breakneck pace to bring Starship online to launch Starlink internet satellites and other payloads.
Since Starship’s first orbital test in April 2023, SpaceX has attempted eight additional integrated flights. During three of those tests, the company made history by catching the massive Super Heavy booster with “chopstick” arms attached to the launch tower.
The data suggests that SpaceX’s rapid progress comes at a cost. And while injury rates alone don’t provide a complete picture of the safety culture at Starbase, they do offer a rare glimpse into the working conditions of the world’s leading space company.
Breaking down Starbase numbers
Starbase City, an unincorporated town in Texas. Image Credits:SpaceX
OSHA uses a standardized safety metric called Total Recordable Incident Rate (TRIR) to measure a company’s safety record and compare it to industry peers, like Blue Origin and United Launch Alliance. The publicly available data has limitations. It doesn’t distinguish between minor injuries like stitches versus serious incidents such as amputations.
TechCrunch calculated the TRIR based on that data, which includes the total number of incidents and total number of hours worked by SpaceX employees at each site.
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Starbase, which plays a central role in SpaceX CEO Elon Musk’s mission to make life multi-planetary, is an outlier in the company and across the industry as a whole. Its TRIR topped out at 4.27 injuries per 100 workers in 2024, when it employed an average of 2,690 workers, according to the data submitted to OSHA. Injured Starbase employees were unable to perform their normal job duties for a total of 3,558 restricted-duty days, plus 656 lost-time days where injuries made them unable to work at all.
Starbase is classified by the U.S. government as a space vehicle manufacturing operation. The injury rate in this sector has fallen dramatically since 1994, dropping from 4.2 injuries per 100 workers to 0.7 injuries per 100 workers in 2023, according to historical data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. (BLS calculates these rates through its annual company surveys, which asks for the same information found in OSHA’s worker injury forms.) But despite major changes in safety processes across the industry, Starbase is closer to the rates of 30 years ago.
The injury rate across all of SpaceX’s manufacturing facilities — which includes an engine development and testing site in McGregor, Texas; a Starlink satellite manufacturing complex in Bastrop, Texas; the Falcon rocket complex in Hawthorne, California; and another satellite manufacturing site in Redmond, Washington — is 2.28.
These other facilities report lower TRIR rates, though most still exceed the industry averages. For instance, 2024 data shows TRIR rates 2.48 at McGregor, 3.49 at Bastrop, 1.43 at Hawthorne, 2.89 at the Redmond site. The 2024 TRIR for aerospace manufacturing as a whole is 1.6.
SpaceX also operates several non-manufacturing sites, including barge operations off both coasts, offices in Sunnyvale, California, and launch sites at Cape Canaveral and Vandenberg Space Force Base.
Former OSHA Chief of Staff Debbie Berkowitz told TechCrunch via email that Starbase’s TRIR “is a red flag that there are serious safety issues that need to be addressed.”
However, there is a debate among safety professionals about whether TRIR is the most reliable metric for assessing and predicting injury rates, particularly serious incidents like fatalities, and especially for small companies. A recent paper on TRIR questioned its statistical validity and advocated that organizations use alternative measures of safety performance instead.
Of the 14 OSHA inspections at SpaceX facilities over the past four years, six involved accidents and injuries at Starbase. That includes a partial finger amputation in 2021 and a crane collapse in June 2025. The latter inspection is still ongoing. Investigations by other news outlets including Reuters have uncovered hundreds of previously unreported worker injuries, including crushed limbs and one fatality.
The 2024 injury rate at Starbase marks an improvement to that of the prior year, which topped out at 5.9 injuries per 100 workers in 2023 and 4.8 injuries in 2022. But it still leads among SpaceX’s land-based facilities, and is second overall only to its west coast booster recovery operations, which has a TRIR of 7.6.
OSHA confirmed TechCrunch’s calculation of Starbase’s TRIR over email, but otherwise did not respond to questions regarding that location’s injury rate. SpaceX did not respond to request for comment.
NASA’s stake
NASA Crew-2 Mission in 2021 returns to Earth. Image Credits:SpaceX under a CC BY NC 2.0 license.
NASA has a major stake in Starship’s development. The agency is counting on using the rocket to return humans to the Moon before the end of this decade, and it is paying more than $4 billion to SpaceX for two crewed Starship flights to the lunar surface.
Both the contract for the Starship lander and SpaceX’s contract for its Commercial Crew services to the International Space Station contain particular clauses that allow the agency to take action in the case of a major breach of safety, such as a fatality or a “willful” or “repeat” OSHA violation.
While a persistently high TRIR rate can be evidence of a safety problem, it is not an automatic trigger for action, and does not fall under the definition of a “major breach of safety” in their contracts.
“NASA interacts frequently with its partners, including SpaceX, to ensure safety from a mission assurance perspective, and remains in regular contact with the company during normal contract administration,” a NASA spokesperson told TechCrunch in response to questions about the company’s TRIR. “Safety is paramount to NASA’s mission success. The agency continues to work with all our commercial partners to build and maintain a healthy safety culture.”
Among rocket makers with vehicles in operation, Starbase still leads the pack: at ULA’s manufacturing facility in Decatur, Alabama, the TRIR is 1.12 injuries per 100 workers; at Blue Origin’s rocket park on the coast of Florida, the rate is 1.09.