they were fined by OSHA for severe safety violations, and they are also compared to a competing space company that is doing much better on safety. The incident does not warrant apologism of SpaceX or any "whataboutist" comparisons to other industries.
it's a funny sentence in the article everyone is picking apart, of course the space industry is not necessarily unsafe, the point seemed to be, and I may be misreading it, that the space industry happens to be more unsafe than it needs to be due to the competitive incentives at play.
Yes, I agree that's the point, and that's the point I disagree with. I don't think that the article contains robust evidence that the space industry as a whole happens to be more unsafe than it needs to be. It focuses on a single case study and cites what would generally be small accident numbers in any other industry. While this case is tragic, I think more evidence is necessary to establish the trend that the article is attempting to show.
