A construction worker building a concrete wall at SpaceX’s Starbase site in November was crushed by a large metal support that fell from a crane, and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration is investigating the incident, TechCrunch has learned.
The worker, Eduardo Cavazos, filed a previously unreported lawsuit in November detailing the accident and suing SpaceX and one of its contractors for negligence. SpaceX reported the incident to OSHA, and the agency opened a “rapid response investigation,” according to Joanna Hawkins, deputy regional director of public affairs.
Rapid response investigations typically involve OSHA asking an employer for more information before deciding whether the agency will conduct an on-site inspection. Hawkins said OSHA is still waiting for SpaceX’s response to that request.
This is the second known crane-related accident at Starbase this year that OSHA is investigating. The agency also opened an investigation into a crane that collapsed at Starbase in late June. It is still not known if any workers were injured during the accident; neither SpaceX nor Starbase city officials have commented on the collapse, which was captured on live-streamed video by LabPadre.
The crane-related accidents are part of a growing list of incidents at the fast-growing South Texas launch facility as CEO Elon Musk has pushed his company to develop massive rockets that can go to the Moon and Mars
A broken hip, knee and shin
Attorneys for Cavazos, who lives in Cameron County, Texas, filed his suit in November just days after the accident. They said he worked as a subcontractor for CCC Group, which was hired by SpaceX to build concrete walls at the Starbase site. On Nov. 15, a crane operator was lifting a “vertical formwork” — which holds wet concrete in place until it dries — when one of the long metal supports “dislodged” and landed on him, Cavazos’ lawyers claim in the lawsuit.
The metal support broke Cavazos’ hip, knee and shin, and he suffered other injuries to his neck, head, shoulders, back and legs. “In all reasonable probability, [Cavazos] has and/or will undergo physical therapy, daily medication, pain management and/or surgical intervention in an attempt to control the pain caused by the injuries in this incident,” his attorneys wrote in the complaint.
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Cavazos sued both CCC Group and SpaceX for negligence and is seeking unspecified damages. He claims both companies should be held responsible for failing to verify that the metal support was properly secured and failing to properly warn workers of this type of hazard at the site, among other alleged safety violations.
Representatives for CCC Group and SpaceX did not respond to requests for comment. Cavazos’ attorneys declined to comment beyond the content of the complaint.
Starbase’s safety record
For years, workers have suffered serious injuries at SpaceX’s Starbase facility. In 2023, a Reuters report on the safety of Starbase revealed several previously unreported injuries, as well as the fact that an employee died in South Texas in 2014 when construction began.
Publicly available data shows the site remains dangerous compared to other SpaceX facilities and those operated by its rivals.
A TechCrunch analysis of OSHA data last July found that Starbase had a Total Recordable Incident Rate (TRIR) of about 4.27 injuries per 100 workers in 2024. SpaceX’s McGregor, Texas rocket test facility had a TRIR of 2.48 in 2024, and its Hawthorne, California, measured at 1 site 4, California. The TRIR for aerospace production as a whole in 2024 was 1.6 injuries per 100 workers.
Former OSHA Chief of Staff Debbie Berkowitz told TechCrunch at the time that Starbase’s TRIR “is a red flag that there are serious safety issues that need to be addressed.”
Transparency at Starbase is also difficult. Businesses are supposed to report serious injuries to OSHA within 24 hours if they involve hospitalizations, amputations or the loss of an eye. Although it appears that SpaceX did in the case of Cavazos, OSHA fined SpaceX $7,000 in early June for failing to report another injury at Starbase that fell into one of these categories. SpaceX contested the penalty, and the two sides reached an undisclosed settlement.
SpaceX has been building out Starbase for more than a decade, but the company has big plans to expand the facility in the coming years. It is currently building a $250 million, 700,000-square-foot rocket factory called “Gigabay,” which it expects to complete by the end of 2026. The company has said it could be used to make as many as 1,000 Starship rockets a year.
The pressure has also only been increasing on SpaceX. Acting NASA Administrator Sean Duffy recently chided the company for not moving fast enough to return astronauts to the Moon after Musk called lunar missions “a distraction” from Mars. Duffy suggested that NASA may choose to use rockets from Jeff Bezos’ space company Blue Origin to land humans on the moon before China, which is expected to attempt the feat in 2029.