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…