A 55-year-old San Antonio construction firm that once built support facilities for NASA's Apollo and Space Shuttle programs has collapsed into Chapter 7 bankruptcy, and SpaceX is now questioning nearly $1.8 million the company transferred to insiders in the months before it went under. Alpha Building Corp. owes roughly $2.8 million to 46 creditors, and SpaceX contends the transfers gave the company's owner and an affiliated firm improper preference over everyone else standing in line.
Alpha Building Corp. was founded in 1969 to support NASA's space program, according to ProView, and operated as a family-owned general contractor for more than five decades before its downfall. That downfall traces back to a roughly $6 million project to build 18 homes plus a launchpad bathroom and break room at SpaceX's Starbase site in South Texas, as reported by San Antonio Express-News. The deal soured sometime in 2024, when SpaceX stopped paying Alpha — though SpaceX has said it ended the arrangement over schedule delays, while a source close to the case said SpaceX fired Alpha for failing to pay its own subcontractors. Alpha, for its part, alleged it was never paid by SpaceX and that it lacked timely access to the construction site.
The Settlement and the Disputed Payouts
The dispute went to arbitration, and on August 20, 2025, SpaceX paid Alpha $2.46 million to settle it. Alpha then transferred about $1.8 million of that settlement to Omega GC Construction Services, an affiliated company that operates out of the same address as Alpha and is owned by the same person, Jonathan Rogero, who also owns Alpha itself. The breakdown included $870,000 sent to Omega in three separate payments and $60,000 sent directly to Rogero, all on that same August date.
Alpha's bankruptcy filings listed $5.4 million in assets against $3.3 million in liabilities when the company officially filed for Chapter 7 liquidation in May 2026 in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Western District of Texas in San Antonio, per the same Express-News report. SpaceX's attorney, Gregory Hesse, said the transfers to Omega and Rogero exceeded what they would have received in a standard bankruptcy distribution. Alpha's attorney, Ray Battaglia, has pushed back, saying Omega was simply used as a conduit to reimburse expenses the company incurred finishing the SpaceX job and to pay outstanding debts owed to subcontractors connected to the Starbase project.
Insider Payments and the Legal Stakes
Under Section 547 of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code, a trustee or creditor can seek to claw back preferential payments made to corporate insiders within one year before a bankruptcy filing, compared with just a 90-day window for ordinary creditors, according to the Office of the Law Revision Counsel. That one-year insider window is central to SpaceX's objection. Hesse has said Alpha's estate holds potentially valuable claims against Omega and Rogero that should not be abandoned through the trustee's report, and SpaceX has alleged the payments could be considered fraudulent if they weren't repayments of legitimate debts. Battaglia has countered that the conduit payments were not preferential at all.
Randolph Osherow, the San Antonio-based trustee overseeing Alpha's bankruptcy case, has concluded there is nothing left of Alpha to repay creditors. SpaceX has asked the federal bankruptcy court in San Antonio to keep the Chapter 7 liquidation case open for further review rather than close the books. A hearing on the matter is set for Monday at 10 a.m. in San Antonio, per bankruptcy court records cited by the Express-News.
A Wider Pattern of Unpaid Starbase Contractors
Alpha and its subcontractors have claimed more than $2 million in liens against SpaceX, and Alpha alone filed at least 27 liens over unpaid work and materials. SpaceX has said, through a source close to the case, that it paid at least $4.7 million to Alpha for Starbase work overall. Battaglia has placed blame for the project's collapse on Sapphire Construction Group LLC, a San Antonio-based company that served as a primary subcontractor on the job.
Alpha's troubles are far from isolated. By February 2025, Texas property records showed at least 29 contractors — including six based in San Antonio — had filed 77 mechanics liens totaling $5.5 million against SpaceX property in Cameron County, a figure that had more than doubled from $2.5 million in May 2024, according to reporting cited in the Express-News coverage. Under Chapter 53 of the Texas Property Code, landowners must retain 10% of a contract's price during construction and can ultimately be held financially responsible for valid liens filed by unpaid subcontractors, per the Texas Real Estate Research Center — a statute that keeps SpaceX exposed even after it pays a general contractor directly.
SpaceX and its property-buying entity, Dogleg Park LLC, owned nearly 500 real estate parcels in Cameron County appraised at more than $364 million as of late 2025, according to the Rio Grande Valley Business Journal. That scale of land ownership underscores why unpaid subcontractors keep filing liens directly against SpaceX property rather than chasing insolvent contractors alone. Subcontractor A&O Des Build, which Sapphire brought onto the Starbase project, has a pending $2.2 million lawsuit in Cameron County District Court against Alpha, Sapphire, SpaceX, and Dogleg Park, claiming it completed housing work but was never paid by either Alpha or Sapphire. That case remains pending.
Other Legal Trouble Piling Up
Beyond the bankruptcy and the SpaceX dispute, Alpha faces a delinquent property tax lawsuit in Comal County and is named in six multidistrict litigation cases over asbestos exposure. Those other proceedings remain on hold pending the outcome of the bankruptcy deliberations. SpaceX's aggressive construction pace at Starbase has coincided with its push for Federal Aviation Administration authorization to conduct up to 25 Starship launches and landings annually, a regulatory effort that has drawn scrutiny from local residents and agencies alike.
The pattern of unpaid vendors is not confined to South Texas. In July, industrial contractor Darana Hybrid Inc. filed two mechanics liens alleging Elon Musk-affiliated SpaceX and xAI owed more than $136.8 million for unpaid work at the Colossus data center facilities in Memphis, Tennessee, with total unpaid vendor claims across those Memphis projects estimated to exceed $500 million. Whether Monday's hearing resolves the fate of Alpha's remaining assets — or simply extends the fight over who gets paid first — remains to be seen.
