Last August, US Navy officials carrying out a test of unmanned vessels realized they had hit a single point of failure: Starlink. A global outage across Elon Musk's satellite network affecting millions of Starlink users had left two dozen unmanned surface vessels bobbing off the California coast, disrupting communications and halting operations for almost an hour, SİA informs via Reuters.
The incident, which involved drones intended to bolster US military options in a conflict with China, was one of several Navy test disruptions linked to SpaceX's Starlink that left operators unable to connect with autonomous boats, according to internal Navy documents and a person familiar with the matter.
As SpaceX rockets toward a $2 trillion public offering this summer – expected to be the largest ever – the company has secured its position as the world's most valuable space company in part by being indispensable to the US government with an array of technologies spanning satellite communications to space launches and military AI.
Starlink, in particular, has proved key to crucial programs - from drones to missile tracking - with a low-earth orbit constellation of close to 10,000 satellites, a scale that provides the military with a network resilient against potential adversary attacks.
But the Navy's mishaps with Starlink for its autonomous drone program, which have not been previously reported, highlight the challenges of the US military's growing reliance on SpaceX and the risks it brings to the Pentagon.
"If there was no Starlink, the US government wouldn't have access to a global constellation of low earth orbit communications," said Clayton Swope, a deputy director of the Aerospace Security Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
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