The Occupational Safety and Health Administration is investigating a 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 OSHA is investigating the incident, TechCrunch has learned.

The worker, Eduardo Cavazos, filed a previously unreported lawsuit in November detailing the incident, 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 for public affairs.

Rapid response investigations typically involve OSHA asking the employer for more information before determining whether the agency will conduct an on-site inspection. OSHA is still waiting for SpaceX to respond to this request, Hawkins said.

This is the second known crane-related accident at Starbase this year that OSHA is investigating. The agency also opened an investigation into the crane collapse at Starbase in late June. It is still unknown whether any workers were injured during this incident. Neither SpaceX nor Starbase City officials have commented on the crash, which was captured on live video by LabPadre.

The crane-related incidents are part of a growing list of accidents at the rapidly expanding launch facility in south Texas, where CEO Elon Musk has pushed his company to develop massive rockets that can go to the moon and Mars.

Fractured hip, knee and leg

Lawyers for Cavazos, a resident of Cameron County, Texas, filed his lawsuit in November, a few days after the accident. They said he was working as a subcontractor for CCC Group, which SpaceX hired to build concrete walls at the Starbase site. On Nov. 15, a crane operator was lifting “vertical formwork” — which holds wet concrete in place until it dries — when one of the long metal supports “separated” and landed on him, Cavazos’ attorneys allege in the lawsuit.

The metal brace broke Cavazos’ hip, knee and leg, and he suffered other injuries to his neck, head, shoulders, back and legs. “In all reasonable possibilities, [Cavazos] “He has and/or will undergo physical therapy, daily medications, pain management therapy, and/or surgical intervention in an effort to control the pain resulting from the injuries sustained in this accident,” his attorneys wrote in the complaint.

Cavazos has sued both CCC Group and SpaceX for negligence and is seeking unspecified damages. He claims that both companies should be held liable for not checking that the metal support was properly installed, and for failing to properly warn workers of this type of hazard on 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 contents of the complaint.

Starbase’s safety record

Workers have suffered serious injuries at SpaceX’s Starbase facility for years. In 2023, a Reuters report on the safety of Starbase revealed several 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 remains dangerous compared to other SpaceX facilities and those operated by its competitors.

A TechCrunch analysis of OSHA data last July found that Starbase had an overall recordable incident rate (TRIR) of about 4.27 injuries per 100 workers in 2024. SpaceX’s McGregor rocket test facility in Texas had a TRIR of 2.48 in 2024, and its Hawthorne, California, site had a recordable incident rate of 1.43. The confirmed infection rate for aviation manufacturing as a whole in 2024 was 1.6 infections per 100 workers.

Starbase’s TRIR “is a red flag that there are serious safety issues that need to be addressed,” former OSHA chief of staff Debbie Berkowitz told TechCrunch at the time.

Transparency at Starbase is also difficult. Companies are supposed to report serious injuries to OSHA within 24 hours if they involve hospitalization, amputation, or loss of an eye. While SpaceX appears to have done that in the Cavazos case, OSHA fined SpaceX $7,000 in early June for not reporting a different infection at Starbase that fell into one of those categories. SpaceX objected to the penalty and the two sides reached an undisclosed settlement.

SpaceX built Starbase more than a decade ago, 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” that is expected to be completed by the end of 2026. The company said it could be used to make up to 1,000 Starship rockets per year.

The pressure has only been mounting on SpaceX, too. NASA’s acting administrator, Sean Duffy, recently criticized 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.