SpaceX employees are more likely to be injured while working at Starship Base than at any of the company's other manufacturing facilities, according to company employee safety records reviewed by TechCrunch. Data released by the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) in May showed that the injury rate at Starship Base, a massive launch and manufacturing site that was recently consolidated as an independent city in Texas, in 2024 was nearly six times the average for similar spacecraft manufacturing companies and nearly three times the rate for the entire aerospace manufacturing industry.

This high injury rate has persisted since SpaceX began submitting Starship base injury data to federal regulators in 2019.

Starship is home to SpaceX’s most ambitious project: a fully reusable super-heavy launch vehicle called Starship. The company is moving at breakneck speed to deploy Starships to launch Starlink internet satellites and other payloads.

Since the first orbital test of Starship in April 2023, SpaceX has conducted eight more comprehensive flight tests. In three of the tests, the company made history by successfully capturing the giant Super Heavy booster using a "Chopstick" robotic arm on the launch tower.

The data shows that SpaceX's rapid progress comes at a cost. While the injury rate alone doesn't give a full picture of the safety culture at Starship Base, it does provide a rare glimpse into the working environment at one of the world's leading aerospace companies.

Starship base data analysis

Starfleet City, an unincorporated town in Texas. Image source: SpaceX

OSHA uses a standardized safety metric called the Total Recordable Incident Rate (TRIR) to measure a company's safety record and compare it to industry peers such as Blue Origin and United Launch Alliance. But there is a limitation in publicly available data, which is that it cannot differentiate between minor injuries, such as stitches, and serious accidents, such as amputations.

TechCrunch calculated TRIR based on this data, which includes the total number of incidents and total employee hours worked at each SpaceX site.

Starship Base, which occupies a central position in SpaceX CEO Elon Musk’s mission to “make life multiplanetary,” is an outlier both within the company and in the industry at large. Its TRIR was as high as 4.27 injuries per 100 workers in 2024, when the base employed an average of 2,690 workers, according to data submitted to OSHA. Injured Starfleet employees were unable to perform their normal job duties due to their injuries for a total of 3,558 days (restricted work days) and an additional 656 days completely unable to work (lost time days).

The U.S. government classifies Starship Base as a spacecraft manufacturing site. According to historical data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the industry's injury rate has dropped significantly since 1994, from 4.2 per 100 workers to 0.7 in 2023 (the Bureau of Labor Statistics calculates these rates through annual company surveys consistent with OSHA's Worker Injury Tables). Yet despite significant changes in safety procedures across the industry, injury rates at starship bases are closer to what they were 30 years ago.

The overall injury rate was 2.28 across all SpaceX manufacturing facilities: the engine development and test site in McGregor, Texas, the Starlink satellite manufacturing complex in Bastrop, Texas, the Falcon Rocket Factory in Hawthorne, California, and another satellite manufacturing site in Redmond, Washington.

Other facilities have lower TRIRs, although most are still above the industry average. For example, 2024 data shows that McGregor has a TRIR of 2.48, Bastrop has a TRIR of 3.49, Hawthorne has a 1.43, and the Redmond site has a TRIR of 2.89. The TRIR for the entire aerospace manufacturing industry in 2024 is 1.6.

SpaceX also operates multiple non-manufacturing sites, including barge operations on the East and West 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 Starship Base’s TRIR “is a red flag that there are serious safety issues that need to be addressed.”

However, safety professionals debate whether TRIR is the most reliable metric for assessing and predicting injury rates, especially for serious events such as fatal accidents, and especially for smaller companies. A recent paper on TRIR questioned its statistical validity and argued that organizations should use alternative safety performance measures.

OSHA has conducted 14 inspections of SpaceX facilities over the past four years, six of which involved accidents and injuries at Starship Base, including 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, uncovered hundreds of previously unreported worker injuries, including crushed limbs and one fatality.

Injury rates at Starship Base improved in 2024 from the previous year — as high as 5.9 per 100 workers in 2023 and 4.8 in 2022. But it still has the highest injury rate among SpaceX's land-based facilities, overall second only to its West Coast booster recovery operations (a TRIR of 7.6).

OSHA confirmed TechCrunch's calculation of Starship Base's TRIR via email but did not respond to additional questions about the injury rate at the site. SpaceX also did not respond to a request for comment.

What's at stake for NASA

The 2021 NASA Crew-2 mission returns to Earth. Image credit: SpaceX, licensed under CC BY NC 2.0.

NASA has a major stake in the development of Starship. The agency is counting on using the rocket to return humans to the moon by the end of this decade, paying SpaceX more than $4 billion for two crewed Starship missions to the lunar surface.

Both the Starship lander contract and SpaceX's contract to provide commercial crew services to the International Space Station contain special provisions that give NASA the authority to take action if a major safety violation occurs (such as a fatality, or what OSHA determines is an "intentional" or "repeated" violation).

While a persistently high TRIR may indicate a safety issue, it is not an automatic trigger for action and does not fall within the definition of a “major safety breach” in the contract.

"NASA regularly interacts with its partners, including SpaceX, to ensure safety from a mission assurance perspective and maintains 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 critical to NASA's mission success. The agency continues to work with all commercial partners to establish and maintain a healthy safety culture."

Starship continues to have some of the highest injury rates among manufacturers with active rockets: United Launch Alliance's manufacturing facility in Decatur, Ala., has a TRIR of 1.12 per 100 workers; Blue Origin's rocket campus on the Florida coast has a TRIR of 1.09.