In November, a construction worker building a concrete wall at SpaceX’s Starbase site was crushed by a large metal support that fell from a crane. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration is investigating the incident.
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. Such investigations typically involve OSHA asking an employer for more information before determining if an on-site inspection is needed. The agency 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 is still not known if any workers were injured during that earlier accident, as neither SpaceX nor Starbase city officials have commented on the collapse.
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 pushes the company to develop massive rockets for missions to the moon and Mars.
Lawyers for Cavazos, a resident of Cameron County, Texas, filed his lawsuit 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 Starbase. 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.
In an amended petition filed this week, Cavazos’ lawyers claim another CCC Group employee was operating the crane and was seen using a cell phone around the time of the accident. The operator recklessly lowered the formwork, causing it to strike the ground and surprising Cavazos and two other workers. The operator then suddenly lifted the formwork up, which is when the 1,200-pound support struck Cavazos.
The metal support broke Cavazos’ hip, knee, and tibia, and he suffered other injuries to his neck, head, shoulders, back, and legs. His lawyers state that in all reasonable probability, he has and will undergo physical therapy, daily medications, pain management treatment, and surgical intervention to control the pain from his injuries.
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 for 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.
Workers have sustained serious injuries at SpaceX’s Starbase facility for years. In 2023, a report 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. An analysis of OSHA data found Starbase had a Total Recordable Incident Rate of around 4.27 injuries per 100 workers in 2024. SpaceX’s McGregor, Texas rocket testing facility had a rate of 2.48, and its Hawthorne, California site measured 1.43. The rate for aerospace manufacturing as a whole in 2024 was 1.6 injuries per 100 workers. A former OSHA official stated that Starbase’s rate is a red flag indicating serious safety issues that need to be addressed.
Transparency at Starbase is also difficult. Companies are required to report serious injuries to OSHA within 24 hours if they involve hospitalizations, amputations, or the loss of an eye. While SpaceX appears to have done so in Cavazos’ case, 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 and has big plans to expand the facility. It is 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.
Pressure has been mounting on SpaceX. A NASA administrator recently chastised the company for not moving quickly enough to return astronauts to the moon, after Musk called lunar missions a distraction from Mars. The administrator suggested NASA may opt to use rockets from Blue Origin to land people on the moon before China, which is expected to attempt the feat in 2029.