WAITLIST NOW 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. Topics