A worker died at SpaceX’s Starbase site in South Texas early Friday morning (May 15), as the company geared up for the debut launch of its Starship V3 megarocket.
The death occurred around 4 a.m. local time on Friday, according to the San Antonio Express-News, which further reported that the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) is investigating the incident.
Starbase is the manufacturing, testing and launch hub for Starship, the fully reusable rocket that SpaceX is developing to help humanity settle the moon and Mars, among other tasks. The vehicle, which stands more than 400 feet (122 meters) tall, is the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built.
Starbase is also one of the nation’s newest cities; it became incorporated in May 2025, by a vote of 212 to 6.
Starbase has been quite busy lately, for SpaceX has been gearing up for a very important launch — the debut of Starship V3 (Version 3), an advanced, more powerful iteration of the rocket that’s capable of reuse and deep-space flight. V3’s maiden test flight will be the 12th overall for Starship, which began flying in fully stacked form in April 2023.
Starship V3 was originally supposed to launch from Starbase today (May 19), but SpaceX pushed the suborbital flight back twice in the past few days, most recently to Thursday evening (May 21). The company has not given a reason for the delays, nor has it publicly commented on the Friday death at Starbase.
Starbase has a higher worker-injury rate than any other SpaceX manufacturing or test site, according to TechCrunch, which performed an analysis in 2025 using OSHA data. And that rate is higher than the industry average, the outlet reported.
Starbase “logged injury rates that were almost 6x higher than the average for comparable space vehicle-manufacturing outfits and nearly 3x higher than aerospace manufacturing as a whole in 2024,” TechCrunch wrote. “That outsized injury rate has persisted since 2019, when SpaceX began sharing Starbase injury data with the federal regulator [OSHA].”
SpaceX is currently dealing with a worker-safety lawsuit — one filed by a truck driver, who says he was injured by liquid methane while delivering the rocket propellant to the company’s McGregor test site, near Waco, in June 2024.
And, on a tangentially related note: More than 50 people who live near Starbase recently filed a federal suit claiming that Starship launches have damaged their homes.
