By now, almost everyone has heard of SpaceX’s Starlink. However, it is lesser known that SpaceX and their subsidiary, Starlink, now have two major government- and military-related contracts. Pilot testing began in 2020 and took a few years to complete. That product — Starshield — is now ready for deployment.
It didn’t take the military long to notice Starlink’s capabilities. With the launch of 23 satellites aboard the SpaceX mission Starlink 6-44 on March 15, 2024, SpaceX surpassed the milestone of more than 6,000 satellites in its massive Starlink constellation. Utilizing those low-earth orbit (LEO) satellites, SpaceX’s frequent launches are building the Starlink constellation to provide communication and internet access to business and residential customers worldwide. It seemed only natural that such capability would benefit the military, too.
SpaceX’s Government/Military Contracts
The first began in May of 2020. At the time, the U.S. Army’s command operations centers utilized communications through geostationary satellites via large dishes mounted on trailers. They lacked mobility, and the satellite was over-subscribed, provided limited throughput, and had high latency. To remedy those deficiencies, the U.S. Army and SpaceX signed a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement ( CRADA) to experiment with moving data across military networks, as reported by SpaceNews. Within two years, the Army’s 35th Corps Signal Brigade (CSB) was testing the Starlink system. (ARSTechnica May 26, 2020).
The Starlink system was found to meet the modern-day military demands for signal equipment. The terminal it uses is small and lightweight, featuring a .6-meter phased array antenna and weighing only 15 pounds. SpaceX even created a miniature mobile satellite antenna to make the Starlink system more portable.
“The benefit of this system is the amount of time it takes for the signal to go up into space and come back down; it saves us a lot of time on latency,” said Chief Warrant Officer 3 Kyle Neese, the senior battalion network technician for the 50th ESB-E. “The old military satellite communication system uses geosynchronous [satellites], which orbit around the equator steadily. However, the signal takes a little over half a second to travel up and back down. With Starlink, it comes back at more than twice the speed.” (U.S. Army, February 28, 2022)
As the use of Starlink grew, SpaceX established a business unit named Starshield about a year ago to consolidate its involvement with United States military and government units. The announcement of Starshield separated the commercial constellation from the one for highly sensitive government and military customers. While Starlink is designed for consumer and commercial use, Starshield is designed for U.S. government use. SpaceX founder Elon Musk explained that “Starshield will be owned by the U.S. government and controlled by the DoD [Department of Defense] Space Force,” Within two years, the Army’s 35th Corps Signal Brigade (CSB) was testing the Starlink system. (ARSTechnica May 26, 2020).
Starshield has three intended aspects: Earth observation, communications, and hosted payloads.
Recently, Starlink has been in the news. President Biden’s Defense Department decided to provide Ukraine with access to Starlink. Soon it was being used by Ukrainian forces on all front lines in the war with Russia, as revealed by the country’s spy chief Kyrylo Budanov, head of the Main Ukrainian Intelligence Directorate, who said, “They have played and continue to play a significant role, because so many systems use the antennas, use the Starlink systems themselves, for communications, for drone transmissions, especially in terms of a remote command post and so on.” (CNN, September 10, 2023)
Starlink worked so well that the Ukrainians, literally fighting for their existence as a free country, were clever enough to modify Starlink for military uses not really intended. This created a dilemma for SpaceX and its chief Elon Musk, who discovered that Starlink was being used to guide drones against the Russians in Russia-occupied Crimea. According to CNN, a Walter Isaacson biography titled Elon Musk contained an excerpt that Musk secretly ordered his engineers to turn off his company’s Starlink satellite communications network near the Crimean coast last year, foiling a planned Ukrainian sneak attack on the Russian naval fleet. Ukrainian officials begged him to turn the satellites back on, but Musk feared that Starlink might be blamed for an undesirable escalation of the war, perhaps involving nuclear weapons.
A future article will discuss more about Starlink and its use in the Ukraine-Russo War.
The second SpaceX initiative with the U.S. military announced in 2020 involved SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket and the Space Force’s Space and Missile Systems Center (SMC). Confident in SpaceX’s ability to recover and reuse the first stage of Falcon rockets, SMC agreed to use them on future GPS missions (SpaceX Updates September 25, 2020), beginning with the June 2020 launch of the satellite known as USA-304 and named Matthew Henson.
Further, SpaceX achieved NSSL certification and completed 95 orbital missions for various customers. With Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy, SpaceX was judged capable of performing every type of national security space mission, to every required reference orbit, with significant performance and schedule margin. Consequently, the Space Force selected SpaceX to carry out critical National Security Space Launch (NSSL) missions ordered over at least the next five years. (SpaceX Updates September 25, 2020)
According to that news release, “To meet or exceed the demanding and unique requirements of the NSSL program, SpaceX invested over a billion dollars of its own money into the Falcon fleet and the associated ground infrastructure, manufacturing processes, payload integration procedures, and mission assurance processes. This private investment over multiple years reflects SpaceX’s deep commitment to reliably launching our customers’ payloads to orbit. And, as SpaceX brought competition back to national security space launch, the United States Air Force saved billions in critical taxpayer funds.”
Space X’s next launch for the National Reconnaissance Office is expected to be NROL-69 sometime this summer. That launch is expected to utilize a Falcon 9 booster, the backbone of SpaceX’s booster fleet.
