OSHA investigating new crane accident at SpaceX’s Starbase facility
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 is 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 determining if the agency will perform 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 probing. The agency also opened an investigation into a crane that collapsed at Starbase in late June. It’s still not known if any workers were injured during that accident; neither SpaceX nor Starbase city officials have commented on the collapse, which was caught on live-streamed video by LabPadre.
The crane-related accidents are part of a growing list of incidents at the rapidly-expanding launch facility in South Texas 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 tibia
Lawyers for Cavazos, a resident of Cameron County, Texas, filed his lawsuit in November just a few days after the accident. They said he was working as a subcontractor of CCC Group, which was hired by SpaceX to construct concrete walls at the Starbase site. On November 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 “detached” and landed on him, Cavazos’ lawyers claim in the lawsuit.
The metal support broke Cavazos’ hip, knee, and tibia, 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 medications, pain management treatment, and/or surgical intervention in an attempt to control the pain caused by the injuries sustained in this incident,” his lawyers 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 not verifying the metal support was properly attached, and failing to properly warn workers of this type of hazard on the site, among other alleged safety violations.
Representatives for CCC Group and SpaceX did not respond to requests for comment. Cavazos’ lawyers declined to comment beyond the contents of the complaint.
Starbase’s safety record
Workers have sustained serious injuries at SpaceX’s Starbase facility for years. In 2023, a Reuters report about the safety of Starbase uncovered numerous previously-unreported injuries, as well as the fact that an employee died at the South Texas site in 2014 when construction began.
Publicly-available data shows the site continues to be dangerous in comparison to other SpaceX facilities and those run by its rivals.
A TechCrunch analysis of OSHA data this past July found Starbase had a Total Recordable Incident Rate (TRIR) of around 4.27 injuries per 100 workers in 2024. SpaceX’s McGregor, Texas rocket testing facility had a TRIR of 2.48 in 2024, and its Hawthorne, California site measured out at 1.43. The TRIR for aerospace manufacturing 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 difficult, too. Companies are supposed to report serious injuries to OSHA within 24 hours if they involve hospitalizations, amputations, or the loss of an eye. While it appears SpaceX did so in the case of Cavazos, OSHA penalized SpaceX $7,000 in early June for not reporting a different injury at Starbase that fell into one of those 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’s currently constructing a $250 million, 700,000-square-foot rocket factory called “Gigabay” that it expects to finish by the end of 2026. The company has said it could be used to make as many as 1,000 Starship rockets per year.
The pressure has only been mounting on SpaceX, too. Acting NASA administrator Sean Duffy recently chastised the company for not moving quickly enough to return astronauts to the Moon, after Musk called lunar missions “a distraction” from Mars. Duffy suggested NASA may opt to use rockets from Jeff Bezos’ space company Blue Origin to land people on the Moon before China, which is expected to attempt the feat in 2029.
Sean O’Kane is a reporter who has spent a decade covering the rapidly-evolving business and technology of the transportation industry, including Tesla and the many startups chasing Elon Musk. Most recently, he was a reporter at Bloomberg News where he helped break stories about some of the most notorious EV SPAC flops. He previously worked at The Verge, where he also covered consumer technology, hosted many short- and long-form videos, performed product and editorial photography, and once nearly passed out in a Red Bull Air Race plane.
You can contact or verify outreach from Sean by emailing sean.okane@techcrunch.com or via encrypted message at okane.01 on Signal.
