SpaceX’s Starbase city officials silent on crane collapse

A crane collapsed at SpaceX’s South Texas rocket facility this week, and the company’s newly formed city won’t say if anyone was hurt.

On June 23, a crane being used to clean up debris from the most recent SpaceX rocket explosion collapsed at the company’s launch complex. Footage of the accident was captured by Lab Padre, one of the content creators who film and photograph the site on a regular basis. But it was filmed from far away, making it impossible to tell whether anyone was harmed or in danger.

SpaceX has not publicly acknowledged the collapse and did not respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment. That’s not surprising; while the company posts details about spaceflight mishaps, like when its Starship rockets blow up, it is otherwise tight-lipped.

But SpaceX’s facility is now part of a newly incorporated city called Starbase, Texas, and this accident happened within its borders. And after one of the Starship rockets blew up on a test stand last week, Starbase officials made a short post on X about it.

There has been no post about the crane collapse, though, and the city has ignored direct appeals for information. TechCrunch has contacted Starbase’s main media email address, its mayor, its two commissioners, its city administrator, and its clerk this week. None have responded to multiple requests for information about the accident.

The collapse is one of the first tests of whether Starbase city has an appetite (and will) for transparency while being run by a SpaceX executive, and acting as a home for the company and more than 200 of its employees. Starbase is also financially beholden to Elon Musk’s spaceflight company: Just this week, the city finalized a $1.5 million loan from SpaceX to fund the city’s operations through September 2025.

The idea of making a city called Starbase was first floated by Musk in 2021. But it wasn’t until May of this year that it formally became a city. Its citizens — mostly SpaceX employees — voted overwhelmingly to incorporate. SpaceX’s vice president of “Texas Test and Launch,” Bobby Peden, became mayor. The company’s senior director of environmental, health, and safety, Jordan Buss, became a commissioner. The other commissioner, Jenna Petrzelka, worked at SpaceX for years.

Those officials have been busy shaping the new city in the last few weeks. The city sent out a notice in late May to residents in a newly proposed “mixed use district” that they may “lose the right to continue using” their property. The city also started erecting gates at SpaceX’s request that limit access to the city, citing safety concerns. Buss said in a meeting that Starbase would grant access to outsiders “if there’s a need to be in the city” and provide “access codes” to ambulances, firefighters, and law enforcement, according to Valley Central.

It’s not clear if those kinds of emergency services were needed Tuesday when the crane collapsed. The Cameron County Sheriff’s Department told TechCrunch that it did not receive any calls from Starbase around the time of the accident. Local fire officials from the nearby city of Brownsville and from Cameron County did not respond to requests for comment.

All we know about the collapse — aside from seeing it happen — is that the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has opened an investigation, according to CNBC.

SpaceX has a troubled history of worker safety. But OSHA investigations take time, and the agency has been diminished by cuts from Musk’s DOGE project. Musk’s companies also do not have very constructive relationships with OSHA. In 2019, Tesla refused to let OSHA inspectors enter its factory in Nevada, even when those inspectors returned with a sheriff’s deputy and a warrant signed by the judge.