Starship development and progress [previous title: Will Musk's starship reach orbit this year?]

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
541

This is another hit piece aimed at Musk. They try to compare SpaceX to the industry for ‘guided missile and space manufacturing’, but that industry doesn’t look much like what SpaceX is doing in Texas, bulding the world’s largest rocket while also building out a spaceport.

Here are the latest accident rates at various SpaceX facilities:

SpaceX Site - 2022 Accident rate

Brownsville - 4.8
Cape Canaveral - 0.9
Hawthorne - 1.8
Kennedy Space Center - 0
McGregor - 2.7
Redmond - 0.8

Now some equivalent accident rates in other similar industries, from the BLS:

Aerospace manufacturing as a whole: 1.9
Aircraft manufacturing: 2.5
Fabricated metal manufacturing: 3.7
Metal tank manufacturing: 5.8
Other metal container manufacturing: 6.2
Machine Shops: 3.6
Steel product manufacturing from purchased steel: 4.3
Rolling and drawing of purchased steel: 4.7
Rolled Steel Shape manufac turing: 4.6

Note that Brownsville is all about rolled steel. Dangerous stuff to work around. And, they are stacking those rings higher than has ever been done before, building pressure vessels, conducting test operations, etc. McGregor’s accident rate, the second highest, is also in line with industries that do a lot of machining and working with heavy objects.

Given all that, I see nothing anomalous about their accident rate.

By the way, the comparison number Reuters used is the lowest number in the entire section, clearly cherry picked. Guided missile and space vehicle propulsion unit and propulsion unit parts manufacturing, for example, is 1.2. and ‘other guided missile and auxiliary equipment manufacturing’ is 1.4.

But again, this is a terrible comparison. The industry in question is mature, much of the work on ‘space vehicles’ is done in the safety of clean rooms, the rockets themselves are old tech and understood. This does not compare at all to building the world’s largest rocket in a rapid iteration environment while inventing the processes and procedures as you go. Just the crane work alone makes if far more dangerous than most space manufacturing. They also deal with dangerous explosives and the whole facility is festooned with pressure vessels and piping. Also, the uniqueness of the project means a lot of safety procedures and best practices have to be developed on site.

SpaceX is involved in dangerous work, and people get hurt. But looking at the actual rates, they don’t seem particularly out of the norm considering the innovation and rapid pace of development.

ETA: Wow, a very similar ninja post. If two of us could see through this that quickly, Reuters really dropped the ball.

542

All the sob stories in the article are another pretty good hint that it wasn’t written to maximally inform the public. Dig into any large company that builds physical stuff, go back 10 years if needed, and you’re going to find examples of some tragic event or other, along with cases where it wasn’t handled properly. It says absolutely nothing about the overall safety culture. But it sure gets people worked up.

543

Yep. Reuters is supposed to be fact-based, not an outlet for emotional hand-wringing in service of an agenda. But that describes most media these days.

544

The weird lie that the 2014 death hadn’t been previously reported also isn’t really doing the rest of the article any favors. The death has been well-known since it happened:

Maybe the name hadn’t been previously reported; I don’t think I’ve seen that come up before.

545

So we’re arguing that one amputation per 1600 Brownsville workers per year (8 incidents in 9 years) is normal and expected? Got it.

Look: SpaceX did not report injuries for 4-6 years. At all. We don’t know what that rate is or how it compares. Arguing this is normal or not is bullshit. Any article that does try to quantify the issue is not a hit piece when SpaceX has refused to do it themselves.

546

Probably? Most of those were fingers. At least one was a partial finger amputation. The article mentions only one “serious” amputation, of a leg. But Boeing had an accident that required a leg amputation during Starliner development, so it’s not exactly unheard of (and Starliner is at a much smaller scale than what SpaceX is doing).

It’s impossible to say whether the amputation rate was abnormal without knowing more details. And my objections were about the 2022 data, not the missing years.

547

Any time you are moving heavy things around by crane, especially in close quarters, the danger factor goes way up. The same goes for working at a height, and workers at Starbase spend a lot of time up in high places.

My brother worked oil rigs. In the oil fields, the FATAL accident rate is 25/100,000 per year. The work is similar - manoevering a lot of heavy equipment in tight spaces, etc. My brother had accident stories all the time, and they took safety extremely seriously.

548

BTW, that 8 amputation figure was for all of SpaceX, not just Brownsville. SpaceX has grown significantly since 2014, having about 3000 employees then, and 13,000 now. Call it an average of 8,000. That makes for a figure of 1.1 amputations per 10,000 employee-years.

You can look at the amputation rates here:

A lot of information is missing, but if you look at the amputation column for manufacturing-adjacent tasks, 1.1 is not that high. Of course, SpaceX isn’t all manufacturing–but it is a sizeable fraction of the company, not just in Brownsville but also Hawthorne and elsewhere. Even if we “derate” the number by 2x or 3x, the rate doesn’t seem out of line (As an aside, check out “other millwork”: 59.1 amputations per 10k! Yikes. Not that anyone should consider that a benchmark. But maybe think about that when you’re getting new hardwood floors installed.).

549

Looks like regulatory approval is a lock:

The FAA shows a number of launch windows reserved from Friday to Sunday:

SPACE X STARSHIP SUPER HEAVY FLT 2  BOCA CHICA, TX
PRIMARY:	11/17/23	1300Z-1720Z
BACKUP:		11/18/23	1300Z-1720Z
	  	    11/19/23	1300Z-1720Z
550

Great news, although I selfishly hope it gets pushed back to Saturday as I would miss it on Friday…

551

It figures a fiend would want to interfere with Space Progress! :grin:

552

The FAA/FWS has finished the environmental assessment at Boca Chica (and it’s totally fine):
https://www.faa.gov/media/72816

I’ve only skimmed it so far, but here’s the money quote:

Per the table above, an average summertime thunderstorm at Boca Chica would deposit more water over the landscape than any single or all combined activations of the deluge system. Since the amount of water that is anticipated to reach the mud flats from a maximum operation of the deluge system is expected to be less than an average summer rainfall event, this amount of water would be unlikely to alter water quality.

Exactly what we concluded earlier in the thread. And as I suspected earlier, most of the required actions are just to ensure that the water is in fact clean (testing the imported water for contaminants, doing soil sampling, etc.).

I think all that’s left is the final signoff from the FAA. All the major steps are done.

553

I have enough experience with federal bureaucracy to be concerned that this final trivial step can take days or weeks if not properly tracked and motivated.

554

True enough, though I suspect that there are enough eyes on them that the motivation is there. NASA is, after all, depending on the success of Starship.

555

But it makes you wonder how difficult the regulatory process is for firms that don’t have SpaceX’s visibility, capital, and importance to the government.

556

Well, that was fast:

557

Agreed. People like to pretend that megacorps are against all regulation, but it’s often exactly the opposite. They love regulation because they have the resources to get through it (from basic manpower to lobbying influence), while their smaller competitors have no such luck. Regulation harms them a little, but it harms the competition more.

Not that I’m against all regulation, either–the FWS report seems sensible and warranted, even if the conclusion was fairly obvious. But there are costs to it.

558

FAA approval document:
https://www.faa.gov/media/69476

Nothing super interesting in there, except that it authorizes only one launch for now. Not too unexpected, and obviously if things go well, it won’t be such a long process next time.

I was mildly curious about the “financial responsibility” requirement mentioned in the FAA tweet. It looks like that means $548M in insurance for potential claims.

559

Your wish has been granted:

SpaceX delays second Starship test launch to Nov. 18 to replace rocket part (msn.com)

560

They seem to be replacing all four grid fin actuators. They’ve been on the vehicle for about a year now. I’d guess that they saw some glitch or underperformance on one actuator, already had newer revisions ready (but were previously saving them for a different vehicle), and decided to just replace all of them in case the problem was in the design.

Only adds another 24 hours, including destacking the second stage and partially disassembling the first. In contrast, when Lockheed-Martin found a faulty Power and Data Unit in the Orion capsule, they said it would take a year to replace it.