> Altshuler’s complaint said that he was concerned the chemicals caused two women in the customer support office to have miscarriages and another man to have a liver transplant.
It seems multiple generations have really downplaying the risk of some of these chemicals. The whole "man up" "osha is a joke" attitude really seems painfully helpless when there small amounts of chemicals that are undetectable by the senses that can kill you, damage your mind irreparably, damage your ability to have healthy children. Heck even our gender expression is controlled by a small amount of chemicals called hormones. I think some fragile egos hate to admit it, but we're entirely powerless to these chemicals unless we can detect and avoid them.
However when they are invisible and often odorless in dangerous doses, number in the 10s of thousands, and are very slow/expensive to detect (i.e. requiring $10k+ mass spectrometers), the only feasible answer I can think of is collective action (i.e. stronger laws, or perhaps unions if those fail). I think such events of pollution need to be investigated as criminal when they have credibly ended lives.
(P.S. I wonder if any women didn't have fullblown miscarriages, but had a baby with other issues that can't necessarily by tied to this exposure. This is something you see in other exposure cases)
This is the answer to most of professional life. Unionize! If you don't manage people, join a union. If you think where you work is fine so you don't need a union, that's when you need one, before something like this happens.
> Starting in 2024, customer support workers reported symptoms that matched the known toxic effects of exposure to several chemicals used in the lab. Douglas Altshuler, a former Starlink customer support associate who lived with Crohn’s disease, experienced an allergic reaction that caused one of his eyes to swell shut. A doctor later attributed his condition to “an unknown chemical exposure,” according to a complaint he submitted to Labor & Industries. SpaceX also received more than two dozen other internal complaints from workers who reported headaches, eye irritation and allergic reactions. Altshuler’s complaint said that he was concerned the chemicals caused two women in the customer support office to have miscarriages and another man to have a liver transplant. InvestigateWest spoke with several former workers who confirmed that at least one woman miscarried. The man who allegedly had a liver transplant could not be reached for this story.
This is pretty scary. Who knows what other health problems employees have are related to this issue. And SpaceX won’t comment or share what chemicals were involved? Horrible.
The Redmond facility apparently works on Starlink satellites, which (unlike Dragon spacecraft) do not use toxic propellants like Hydrazine. Hydrazine is very nasty stuff and even trace exposure can cause eye irritation and conjunctivitis.
In any case, it seems strange that customer support staff, who are presumably not trained in haz-mat protocols etc, would be colocated with a lab using toxic chemicals.
Regulations and unions are still never enough no matter what you do.
There must be no shortage of integrity & knowhow.
The problem arises when the chemicals on site add up to a need for professional handling exceeding that which exists at the site.
The top person has to actually know what to do, and actually step up to the plate and do it in complete co-operation with the ones at the front lines handling the materials. And everyone in between. Another whole level of risk management needs to focus on exposure radius when it can extend beyond the confines of the recognized hazardous site. The degree of risk relative to proximity can build to where many off-site occupants are not informed when things escalate beyond a minimal amount.
Which almost never happens ideally, even when it's a purpose-built chemical facility.
In an "office" building it can be a real slippery slope. Soldering a few cables or treating PCBs may not seem like a problem for an occasional prototype. And then with growth pressure you get a dozen people doing it all day every couple months. Pretty rough, but at least it's not every day and at least it's not every month.
How you get there and where you go from there is really the defining characteristic.
Say it is not so. Company that likes illegally discharging wastewater [1][2] run by man who leads companies to dump toxic waste into city water systems as soon as the inspectors leave [3][4][5] with a company that has multiple times the industry-average injury rate and actively sought to bury it by ignoring mandatory reporting requirements for multiple years [6] defends and denies poor safety practices that expose workers to dangerous chemicals and fires them for the audacity to complain about illegal unsafe working conditions.
This repeated pattern of illegal, safety-regressive behavior must be a fluke. Frankly, if the leadership creates cultures that harm their workers and where retaliation against workers was normal, then you would expect that to occur at other companies they run. Like, some kind of successful lawsuit where workers complained about their supervisors calling all their black coworkers the N-word and all the swastikas on the walls then were reprimanded for bringing it up [7] where the judge legally declared the companies "conduct was reprehensible and repeated"[8] and awards in excess of the standard maximum were "appropriate in light of the endemic racism at the Tesla factory and Tesla's repeated failure to rectify it"[9].
See, the rampant disregard for their workers and retaliation against workers is not at all in their corporate DNA all the way to the top. Just your regular old California Bay Area company where workers are called the N-word [10] and get retaliated against.
[10] I mean seriously, where do you even find people who will use the N-word in the Bay Area. Did they put all their job ads in the KKK and Neo-Nazi Bay Area Facebook groups? Is it like one of those anti-spy tests where you have people say: "Death to (insert country leader here)", but you have to use the N-word to get hired?
Having personally known one of the people who would have said that and possibly named in the complaint and ultimately fired (far too late imho), many were relocated from other parts of the country including the Mid-west.
I am a huge fan of SpaceX and I think that establishing a multi-planetary civilization is the most important thing to do, and, I’ll say bluntly, will save lives. But I think that knowingly causing miscarriage of a pregnancy should be investigated as manslaughter.
I know I'll sound like a rube but somehow it rubs me the wrong way that the rich and powerful are spending billions trying to establish multiplanetary civilisations despite the fact that we still have plenty of unfixed problems here at home that also deserve attention and resources, if not more so.
Are they being subsidized the same way my employer subsidizes my lifestyle?
If I sell steel, grain, boots, or launch services to the government and that gives me profits that I invest into some aspect of my business, I’m not sure that “subsidized by” is the clearest term.
Pretty much all of the commercial rocket companies are in America. There is competition between them. In the amount of money that SpaceX gets from the government is quite small compared to its overall operating expenses. They launched 90% of all mass to orbit, most of which is commercial.
The “SpaceX lives on government subsidies” thing is a myth.
> that the rich and powerful are spending billions trying to establish multiplanetary civilisations
Citation needed. What are the current projects to make this happen? Starship is a work in progress, but that by itself wont be able to create a colony out of thin air.
It's probably more because of the news than the world. It's not possible for there not to be plenty of unfixed problems. No matter how many problems we solve -- and we've solved a hell of a lot over the past decades or century -- other existing problems will take their place as seeming to be important.
If I'm being too extreme, can you describe a world where you'd consider enough problems have been solved that it's worth spending billions colonizing space?
I can't believe that pipedream being anything but the largest company town. Who needs Scrip when you have to work for... every vital resource, even air?
Not Rube-ish or rubish at all, IMO. I believe they're more interested in power or recreational drug use than problem-solving. Horses for courses.
How will it save lives? It'll maybe create more lives that persist beyond those on Earth, but I don't think it will meaningfully lower our global population, so a planetary catastrophe would still kill just as many people.
Also "the most important thing?"
You don't think there's any lower hanging fruit on-planet we could attend to first? Maybe addressing hunger, poverty, pollution, resource wars? You think getting the first ten-thousand people to Mars is a bigger priority than eradicating diseases that kill 10 times that many annually and that we have all the tools necessary to control? Really really?
> I am a huge fan of SpaceX and I think that establishing a multi-planetary civilization is the most important thing to do, and, I’ll say bluntly, will save lives.
How can we credibly talk about saving lives on other planets when we are demonstrably unable to protect life on the only habitable world we actually have? If we are failing at basic stewardship here, what evidence is there that we would act more responsibly anywhere else?
>But I think that knowingly causing miscarriage of a pregnancy should be investigated as manslaughter.
A) op didnt clarify who was doing the initiation of a miscarriage. There's unclarified ambiguity.
B) charging manslaughter for one person, and providing medical support for another for the same action of facilitating a miscarriage enters a very real legal discourse know as the entire debate around women's rights. If you would like to know more you can review the legal precedents associated therein.
How would sending a few dozen people to the subzero anoxic radioactive and sterile desert known as Mars help Humanity? Would be cool, don't get me wrong, but utterly useless for anything other than scientific research.
A completely unrealistic plan though, to anyone who has thought about it for half a second.
A mars colony is probably doable. A self-sustaining mars colony? For the length of time it would take a completely devastated Earth to recover? Absolutely impossible, at least with our current technology.
Think about the level of supply chain you'd need to get something like a computer or a solar panel made on Mars. Where do you get plastic? Iron ore? Copper? Pure fantasy.
Sure, his ketamin-addled brain has been promising us that there would be millions of humans on Mars very soon for years now. That doesn't make it real. And that does not explain either how they'd survive, or even how they'd get there in the first place. Sending one ship to Mars is something, sending thousands is unfeasible in this century.
Also, I don't believe they'd ever be auto-sufficient, because of the aforementioned qualities of Mars: anoxic, sterile, radioactive and subzero. They'd certainly never thrive. More probably, they'd live in a kind of inescapable company-town, millions of miles away from the nearest jurisdiction, at the mercy of a guy known for brutalizing his workers, where going on strike means you probably just die. Sounds like absolute hell.
So, unfeasible, unrealistic, pointless. You can do much more good for humanity by investing here on Earth, obviously.
> children dying from diseases whose vaccinations cost 1$
If there’s a government anywhere that isn’t providing this for its citizens, perhaps looking into why that government is such a failure would yield greater and more durable change than a point patch of just a few vaccines.
> If the top 1% would spend 1% of their wealth
Why should we expect/demand more generosity from only 1% of the population? Maybe everyone should spend 1% of their wealth on these efforts? It’s easy to be magnanimous with someone else’s wallet.
> Why should we expect/demand more generosity from only 1% of the population? Maybe everyone should spend 1% of their wealth on these efforts? It’s easy to be magnanimous with someone else’s wallet.
I was mainly referring to the "super rich" (Musk, Bezos, etc.) since this topic was about how SpaceX treats people and because "multi-planetary civilization" is primarily a thing I connect with their companies.
I do donate ~10% of my income. Not sure how much the average FAANG-CEO does donate.
> If there’s a government anywhere that isn’t providing this for its citizens, perhaps looking into why that government is such a failure would yield greater and more durable change than a point patch of just a few vaccines.
Failed States and Corruption do exist. They have various complicated reasons which to address would certainly not be "a low-hanging fruit".
Of course, solving these would be a good thing, but not within the scope of "donate food, donate medicine, pay teachers"
Suppose there’s a failed state or widespread corruption somewhere and a child there who needs $1 worth of vaccine or $1 worth of food.
What’s the chance that or fraction of your dollar, my dollar, or a billionaire’s dollar will end up actually reaching and helping that child? We’ve all seen food aid donations fail to reach those in need for precisely the same corruption that caused it to be needed in the first place.
> Why should we expect/demand more generosity from only 1% of the population?
“More” generosity? As if any is given. And it’s not about “generosity”, it’s about contributing to the society they are taking from. Billionaires exploit everyone else to the point of causing disease and death then hoard all the money produced from that for themselves.
So sick of this dumb conspiracy theory. The whole theory boils down to 'many people have worked in the US space industry since the 80s'. It very fucking dumb.
The increasing in funding for Space companies by DoD in the early SpaceX area (early 2000s) was related to DoD realizing they don't have enough assets over the middle east and wanted smaller companies and rockets to do faster deployment. This evolved further from DoD and since then with Firefly having done a number of missions based on that. Keyword is 'responsive launch'.
Space based missile defense in this period was clearly not the priority and communication, spy sats and navigation sats were getting the overwhelming amount of funding.
NASA on the other hand certainty didn't create COTS for missile defense reasons even if the leader of NASA was a supporter of investment missile defense (as many space people were and are). And the people who designed the COTS program certainty didn't think of that. There are detailed interviews with many of the people involved where they explain their reasons and how and why they came up with the programs.
As for Musk himself, there are details interviews with pretty much everybody that was involved early in SpaceX. And it quite clear that from the beginning Mars was the focus. Musk was not very well informed or interested in US space defense policy early on. And just like literally everybody, he knew much more about NASA then the DoD side of space. Remember that back then, there was much less information available about these things. Musk lived in Canada and then was busy with Internet stuff, he hardly was some kind of US defense nerd.
Its only when SpaceX moved on from the 'Greenhouse on Mars' project to a rocket company that Musk had to start seriously learning about the funding opportunities and commercial opportunity for small rockets. And eventually this lead him to sue DoD over access to contracts.
This whole conspiracy theory hinges on reinterpreting everything that happened in US space development from 1980 to 2020 as some hidden behind the scenes crusade to create Golden Dome and only collects evidence for this to be true and ignores literally all evidence that suggest this isn't the case.
The only thing that is totally clear, and nobody has ever disputed is that many space people in the US have thought about space missile defense since the 80s and always hoped that it would eventually happen.
Missile defense was always part of wider US space consideration, but claiming it was always the driving force for everything is simply not true.
It seems multiple generations have really downplaying the risk of some of these chemicals. The whole "man up" "osha is a joke" attitude really seems painfully helpless when there small amounts of chemicals that are undetectable by the senses that can kill you, damage your mind irreparably, damage your ability to have healthy children. Heck even our gender expression is controlled by a small amount of chemicals called hormones. I think some fragile egos hate to admit it, but we're entirely powerless to these chemicals unless we can detect and avoid them.
However when they are invisible and often odorless in dangerous doses, number in the 10s of thousands, and are very slow/expensive to detect (i.e. requiring $10k+ mass spectrometers), the only feasible answer I can think of is collective action (i.e. stronger laws, or perhaps unions if those fail). I think such events of pollution need to be investigated as criminal when they have credibly ended lives.
(P.S. I wonder if any women didn't have fullblown miscarriages, but had a baby with other issues that can't necessarily by tied to this exposure. This is something you see in other exposure cases)
Less than SpaceX spent a lawyers to appeal it. Less than the cost of ventilation.
I guess you can look forward to that happening again then!
Pro-tip, join a Trade Union, your country doesn't protect you
This is pretty scary. Who knows what other health problems employees have are related to this issue. And SpaceX won’t comment or share what chemicals were involved? Horrible.
In any case, it seems strange that customer support staff, who are presumably not trained in haz-mat protocols etc, would be colocated with a lab using toxic chemicals.
There must be no shortage of integrity & knowhow.
The problem arises when the chemicals on site add up to a need for professional handling exceeding that which exists at the site.
The top person has to actually know what to do, and actually step up to the plate and do it in complete co-operation with the ones at the front lines handling the materials. And everyone in between. Another whole level of risk management needs to focus on exposure radius when it can extend beyond the confines of the recognized hazardous site. The degree of risk relative to proximity can build to where many off-site occupants are not informed when things escalate beyond a minimal amount.
Which almost never happens ideally, even when it's a purpose-built chemical facility.
In an "office" building it can be a real slippery slope. Soldering a few cables or treating PCBs may not seem like a problem for an occasional prototype. And then with growth pressure you get a dozen people doing it all day every couple months. Pretty rough, but at least it's not every day and at least it's not every month.
How you get there and where you go from there is really the defining characteristic.
This repeated pattern of illegal, safety-regressive behavior must be a fluke. Frankly, if the leadership creates cultures that harm their workers and where retaliation against workers was normal, then you would expect that to occur at other companies they run. Like, some kind of successful lawsuit where workers complained about their supervisors calling all their black coworkers the N-word and all the swastikas on the walls then were reprimanded for bringing it up [7] where the judge legally declared the companies "conduct was reprehensible and repeated"[8] and awards in excess of the standard maximum were "appropriate in light of the endemic racism at the Tesla factory and Tesla's repeated failure to rectify it"[9].
See, the rampant disregard for their workers and retaliation against workers is not at all in their corporate DNA all the way to the top. Just your regular old California Bay Area company where workers are called the N-word [10] and get retaliated against.
[1] https://payloadspace.com/spacex-back-up-to-its-neck-in-disch...
[2] https://www.sacurrent.com/news/federal-government-fines-elon...
[3] https://fortune.com/2025/11/08/boring-company-drilling-fluid...
[4] https://fortune.com/2025/11/12/elon-musk-boring-company-tunn...
[5] https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/26184164-tbc-state-l...
[6] https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/spacex-m...
[7] https://www.govinfo.gov/app/details/USCOURTS-cand-3_17-cv-06...
[8] https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/USCOURTS-cand-3_17-cv-06... Page 29
[9] https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/USCOURTS-cand-3_17-cv-06... Page 1
[10] I mean seriously, where do you even find people who will use the N-word in the Bay Area. Did they put all their job ads in the KKK and Neo-Nazi Bay Area Facebook groups? Is it like one of those anti-spy tests where you have people say: "Death to (insert country leader here)", but you have to use the N-word to get hired?
If I sell steel, grain, boots, or launch services to the government and that gives me profits that I invest into some aspect of my business, I’m not sure that “subsidized by” is the clearest term.
The “SpaceX lives on government subsidies” thing is a myth.
Citation needed. What are the current projects to make this happen? Starship is a work in progress, but that by itself wont be able to create a colony out of thin air.
If I'm being too extreme, can you describe a world where you'd consider enough problems have been solved that it's worth spending billions colonizing space?
Not Rube-ish or rubish at all, IMO. I believe they're more interested in power or recreational drug use than problem-solving. Horses for courses.
Instead of establishing multiplanetary civilisations, they're burning our single-planetary atmosphere in their hubris and ego.
Also "the most important thing?"
You don't think there's any lower hanging fruit on-planet we could attend to first? Maybe addressing hunger, poverty, pollution, resource wars? You think getting the first ten-thousand people to Mars is a bigger priority than eradicating diseases that kill 10 times that many annually and that we have all the tools necessary to control? Really really?
How can we credibly talk about saving lives on other planets when we are demonstrably unable to protect life on the only habitable world we actually have? If we are failing at basic stewardship here, what evidence is there that we would act more responsibly anywhere else?
Then, legally, carrying out an abortion would need to be investigated as manslaughter as well.
Think of the implications.
Either killing a fetus is the same as killing a human, or you pretend fetus aren’t human and they don’t have rights.
You can’t have the cake and eat it too.
A) op didnt clarify who was doing the initiation of a miscarriage. There's unclarified ambiguity.
B) charging manslaughter for one person, and providing medical support for another for the same action of facilitating a miscarriage enters a very real legal discourse know as the entire debate around women's rights. If you would like to know more you can review the legal precedents associated therein.
A mars colony is probably doable. A self-sustaining mars colony? For the length of time it would take a completely devastated Earth to recover? Absolutely impossible, at least with our current technology.
Think about the level of supply chain you'd need to get something like a computer or a solar panel made on Mars. Where do you get plastic? Iron ore? Copper? Pure fantasy.
It would still be cool to have a colony on mars.
Also, I don't believe they'd ever be auto-sufficient, because of the aforementioned qualities of Mars: anoxic, sterile, radioactive and subzero. They'd certainly never thrive. More probably, they'd live in a kind of inescapable company-town, millions of miles away from the nearest jurisdiction, at the mercy of a guy known for brutalizing his workers, where going on strike means you probably just die. Sounds like absolute hell.
So, unfeasible, unrealistic, pointless. You can do much more good for humanity by investing here on Earth, obviously.
If the top 1% would spend 1% of their wealth on preventing "low-hanging fruits" like
You call "knowingly causing miscarriage" manslaughter, but boy have you looked at what "we" ("first world") are causing elsewhere in a global scale?If there’s a government anywhere that isn’t providing this for its citizens, perhaps looking into why that government is such a failure would yield greater and more durable change than a point patch of just a few vaccines.
> If the top 1% would spend 1% of their wealth
Why should we expect/demand more generosity from only 1% of the population? Maybe everyone should spend 1% of their wealth on these efforts? It’s easy to be magnanimous with someone else’s wallet.
I was mainly referring to the "super rich" (Musk, Bezos, etc.) since this topic was about how SpaceX treats people and because "multi-planetary civilization" is primarily a thing I connect with their companies. I do donate ~10% of my income. Not sure how much the average FAANG-CEO does donate.
> If there’s a government anywhere that isn’t providing this for its citizens, perhaps looking into why that government is such a failure would yield greater and more durable change than a point patch of just a few vaccines.
Failed States and Corruption do exist. They have various complicated reasons which to address would certainly not be "a low-hanging fruit". Of course, solving these would be a good thing, but not within the scope of "donate food, donate medicine, pay teachers"
What’s the chance that or fraction of your dollar, my dollar, or a billionaire’s dollar will end up actually reaching and helping that child? We’ve all seen food aid donations fail to reach those in need for precisely the same corruption that caused it to be needed in the first place.
“More” generosity? As if any is given. And it’s not about “generosity”, it’s about contributing to the society they are taking from. Billionaires exploit everyone else to the point of causing disease and death then hoard all the money produced from that for themselves.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Dome_(missile_defense_s...
The increasing in funding for Space companies by DoD in the early SpaceX area (early 2000s) was related to DoD realizing they don't have enough assets over the middle east and wanted smaller companies and rockets to do faster deployment. This evolved further from DoD and since then with Firefly having done a number of missions based on that. Keyword is 'responsive launch'.
Space based missile defense in this period was clearly not the priority and communication, spy sats and navigation sats were getting the overwhelming amount of funding.
NASA on the other hand certainty didn't create COTS for missile defense reasons even if the leader of NASA was a supporter of investment missile defense (as many space people were and are). And the people who designed the COTS program certainty didn't think of that. There are detailed interviews with many of the people involved where they explain their reasons and how and why they came up with the programs.
As for Musk himself, there are details interviews with pretty much everybody that was involved early in SpaceX. And it quite clear that from the beginning Mars was the focus. Musk was not very well informed or interested in US space defense policy early on. And just like literally everybody, he knew much more about NASA then the DoD side of space. Remember that back then, there was much less information available about these things. Musk lived in Canada and then was busy with Internet stuff, he hardly was some kind of US defense nerd.
Its only when SpaceX moved on from the 'Greenhouse on Mars' project to a rocket company that Musk had to start seriously learning about the funding opportunities and commercial opportunity for small rockets. And eventually this lead him to sue DoD over access to contracts.
This whole conspiracy theory hinges on reinterpreting everything that happened in US space development from 1980 to 2020 as some hidden behind the scenes crusade to create Golden Dome and only collects evidence for this to be true and ignores literally all evidence that suggest this isn't the case.
The only thing that is totally clear, and nobody has ever disputed is that many space people in the US have thought about space missile defense since the 80s and always hoped that it would eventually happen.
Missile defense was always part of wider US space consideration, but claiming it was always the driving force for everything is simply not true.
The Mars concept was absolutely grounded in the same strategic goals for global missile defense. It was about aligning those pieces.
Many forget the DC-X.
What bearing does this have on any of this?
> Mars concept was absolutely grounded in the same strategic goals for global missile defense
No shit. A launch vehicle is a launch vehicle.