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

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_accidents_and_incidents#Other_non-astronaut_fatalities https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spaceflight-related_ac...