Around 4 a.m. on May 15, in the 1-year-old South Texas town of Starbase, Jose Luis Bautista, a 25-year-old man from nearby Donna, rode a scissor lift around 50 feet up toward the ceiling of the “Starfactory,” where Elon Musk’s SpaceX makes parts for its Starship rockets. Bautista and other workers with Delta Fabrication and Machine Inc., a contractor out of Daingerfield, needed to replace metal beams supporting the structure of the factory with new ones.
Bautista strapped himself to a white beam that weighed nearly 8,000 pounds and was about 5 stories off the ground. The beam, Bautista’s supervisor would later tell Cameron County sheriff’s officers, had “not been adjusted correctly.” The supervisor, named as Brent Lee Harvey in the sheriff’s office case report, said that he had contacted a foreman, Omar Alvarado, and instructed his team to “properly adjust and secure the beam to the structure.”
According to the report, Bautista was attaching himself to another beam when the one he was already secured to started falling. Alvarado told a sheriff’s investigator that he was on the phone when the beam fell and took Bautista with it. Alvarado further told the investigator that Bautista may have thought the beam was secure because it had anchor bolts already installed on it. Bautista would hit the beam on the way down before falling to the concrete factory floor.
Harvey said, per the report, that “he did not know why Jose Luis would have attached himself to the improperly secured beam.” Harvey also said that the bolts on the beam were temporary.
Within minutes of Bautista falling, a man described with the acronym “EHS”—likely an environmental health and safety specialist—started doing CPR, and security guards arrived to help load Bautista into one of Starbase’s ambulances, the report states. Doctors would pronounce him dead at a Brownsville hospital the same day. Three days later, after an autopsy, Cameron County would declare his cause of death “multiple blunt force trauma due to a fall.”
The Cameron County Sheriff’s Office declared Bautista’s death an accident. Initial news reports said Bautista had fallen only 8 feet—rather than the much greater height described in the later sheriff’s office report—based on what hospital staff had told Cameron County Justice of the Peace Mary Sorola. Sorola did not respond to the Observer’s requests for more information about those conversations.
Starbase in 2021 (Ivan Armando Flores/Texas Observer)
It’s unclear whether SpaceX CEO Elon Musk was at Starbase—a name now used both for the newfound company town and the company’s production and launch facilities near Boca Chica Beach—on the day Bautista died. His private jet’s flight log shows his plane flying from Los Angeles to Brownsville on May 21, six days after the incident, and returning to California on May 22, the same day as the last Starship launch. The Starship exploded on May 22, prompting another mishap investigation by the Federal Aviation Administration. Musk hasn’t publicly commented on Bautista’s death. Cameron County Sheriff Manuel Treviño told the Observer in an email that the law enforcement agency gave all the evidence it collected to the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA).
“OSHA is looking at specific violations of standards, so this could be violation of various fall protection standards, or mechanical equipment standards, mechanical lift standards,” Jordan Barab, a former deputy assistant secretary of OSHA during the Obama administration, told the Observer. “OSHA’s probably going to be looking into other things, like training and some structural issues on how the beam was attached.”
Bautista’s death is the first worker fatality at SpaceX’s South Texas facilities, but there have been numerous injuries there in the last few years. Just among its own employees—not including those working for contractors on-site—SpaceX saw 427 injuries and 9 respiratory illnesses between January 6, 2022, and June 10, 2025, according to documents SpaceX filed with OSHA and acquired by the Observer through a records request. These injuries included concussions, second-degree burns, partial finger amputations, hernias, dislocations, crushed hands, and broken ribs, legs, and ankles.
OSHA did not release more recent records documenting injuries because they are part of ongoing investigations into incidents at the Starbase facility, one of which is Bautista’s death.
Another ongoing investigation stems from a crane tipping over at SpaceX’s Massey testing site, which is a little more than five miles west of the factory and the launch pad. Workers were removing debris from a Starship exploding at the test site last year. As the crane fell, its operator jumped out of the cab and onto the ground, according to OSHA records, breaking his pelvis and wrist and receiving a minor head injury. OSHA cited SpaceX eight times for the incident, including a violation for a worker operating a separate crane with an expired license and another for the tipped-over crane not having been inspected in the last year. SpaceX is contesting all of the citations.
An Observer analysis of injuries at SpaceX’s Starbase in 2025, using OSHA’s publicly available injury data, shows that the company had an injury rate that’s more than five times the national average for comparable space vehicle manufacturing facilities in the United States. The company’s facility in Hawthorne, California, which has more than twice the employees of Starbase, has less than half the injury rate of the South Texas site. OSHA confirmed these calculations as accurate when asked by the Observer.
Some employees who suffered such injuries have filed lawsuits against SpaceX in Cameron County courts, many of which are still pending and have yet to see trial. This includes a former worker who had his leg crushed from being run over by a boom lift, another who got head injuries from a falling ladder, and another who fell into an improperly lit open pit.
One open lawsuit, from San Benito resident Doroteo Perez, describes an incident that is similar to the circumstances of Bautista’s fall. Perez, who was an employee for a contractor working at Starbase in 2024, alleges that SpaceX personnel told him a piece of machinery he was dismantling was “structurally sound” before he began to dismantle it. “As soon as the Plaintiff began cutting, the structural piece collapsed upon Plaintiff’s person,” the lawsuit states. Perez’s attorney, Richard Zayas, did not respond to requests for comment about the case.
In the sheriff’s office case report from May, both Bautista’s foreman and superintendent point to Bautista being responsible for his own safety. Barab said it’s common for employers to shift blame for an incident to an employee, but that it usually doesn’t work as a defense.
“The employer has to prove that the employee was well trained, well supervised, well equipped, and violated the employer’s safety rules anyway,” Barab said. “Generally the employer also has to prove that employees who committed similar offenses have been disciplined in the past as well.”
According to the report, Bautista had only previously been warned to properly adjust his safety glasses, with Harvey and Alvarado both saying that Bautista didn’t have prior safety violations.
“As management, you’re responsible to make sure that your crew and the people that are about to be on this task are fully aware of what’s going on,” a former foreman who worked on similar jobs at Starbase last year—and who requested anonymity out of fear of job-related consequences because they still work in the same industry—told the Observer. “In a situation like that, they should have been right there.”
The same ex-foreman noted that OSHA would likely be investigating whether there was a Job Safety Analysis (JSA) for the work Bautista was doing. Treviño, the Cameron County sheriff, when asked whether his investigators looked at a JSA, told the Observer: “not to my knowledge.”
The City of Starbase and SpaceX did not respond to questions about Bautista’s death from the Observer. Neither did Delta Fabrication and Machine, Inc.
Elon Musk, beside the right-wing president of Argentina in February 2025, wears a MAGA hat and wields a chainsaw, symbolizing his short-lived but destructive tenure leading DOGE. (Shutterstock)
In 2024, SpaceX was named one of the nonprofit National Council for Occupational Safety and Health’s “Dirty Dozen,” after reporting from Reuters showed the Starbase site had hundreds of injuries, many of them not reported to OSHA.
“SpaceX is one of the richest and most powerful companies in the world. It has access to extraordinary resources, cutting-edge technology, and some of the most advanced engineers on the planet,” Jessica E. Martinez, the executive director of the nonprofit, told the Observer in a statement. “There is simply no excuse for workers being exposed to preventable hazards. Whether someone is a direct employee or a contract worker, their life should never be treated as expendable.”
OSHA is expected to take up to six months to conclude its investigation into Bautista’s death. The agency rejected a records request for documents because its investigation is ongoing.
Meanwhile, less than a month after Bautista’s death, SpaceX went public, raising $75 billion in its record-breaking initial offering. The company’s stock valuation briefly made Musk the first trillionaire in world history.
The post Worker’s Death at SpaceX Factory Followed Hundreds of Injuries in Recent Years appeared first on The Texas Observer.
Leave a Reply