SpaceX didn’t properly inspect a hydraulic crane that had recently been repaired before it collapsed at the company’s Starbase, Texas, facility last June, according to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.
As a result, the federal safety agency has hit SpaceX with seven “serious” violations related to its investigation, which it opened one day after the crane collapse. OSHA issued the maximum financial penalty it can levy on six of those “serious” violations, giving Elon Musk’s spaceflight company a combined fine of $115,850.
OSHA’s probe is still open according to the agency’s website. It’s still unclear whether any workers were harmed in the accident. SpaceX is able to contest the penalties; the company did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The penalty and violations come as SpaceX is set to ramp up activity at the Starbase facility, partly fueled by a race to fulfill President Donald Trump’s goal of returning astronauts to the moon by the end of his second term. The company has clearance from the Federal Aviation Administration to perform as many as 25 Starship launches in Texas this year. At the same time, it is undergoing rapid expansion of the launch complex to meet Musk’s grand ambitions of building thousands of Starship rockets per year.
SpaceX has had a long history of injuries at the South Texas launch complex. A 2023 Reuters report uncovered dozens of previously unreported injuries — and one employee death — that happened as the facility was built up across the last decade. A TechCrunch analysis of OSHA data last year showed SpaceX has a much higher injury rate at the Starbase site than at other facilities run by the company, or those of its industry peers.
Accidents keep happening, too. In December, an employee of a SpaceX subcontractor filed a lawsuit against SpaceX after he was allegedly crushed by a large metal support dropped from a crane. OSHA is also investigating that accident, as TechCrunch first reported.
The crane collapse at the center of the new OSHA penalty happened on June 24, 2025. SpaceX employees at a Starbase test site were cleaning up debris from a Starship explosion just four days prior. Footage captured by LabPadre, which posts livestreams of the Starbase site, showed a crane buckling under the weight of a large piece of the exploded Starship.
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According to the new citations posted to OSHA’s website, one employee was using a Grove RT9150E crane to lift the debris while another used an excavator’s bucket to inspect it, in hopes of determining the cause of the explosion.
That Grove crane had recently been repaired, according to the citations, and returned to SpaceX “without the employer ensuring repairs met manufacturer’s criteria via an inspection by a qualified person.” It is not clear why the crane was repaired, but another citation states a Grove RT9150E crane at the test site had a computer that would not start until “multiple attempts” were made.
OSHA claims SpaceX was either not performing or not documenting monthly inspections on the Grove crane and that it hadn’t been inspected “within the last 12 months.” SpaceX did not perform monthly inspections of the wire rope being used to move debris either, according to OSHA. And OSHA claims rigging equipment used at the site was missing manufacturer-prescribed markings that are supposed to detail a “safe working load.”
As part of its investigation, OSHA also found that an employee had been operating a Tadano 90-ton crawler crane to move debris at the test site with an expired certification from the National Commission for the Certification of Crane Operators.
