Space Force awards SpaceX a $4.16 billion satellite contract, the second this week
The Space Force yesterday awarded SpaceX a $4.16 billion contract to build a satellite constellation to track all flying objects, in addition to the $2.29 billion contract it awarded the company earlier in the week for a different data/communications constellation.
The $4.16 billion Other Transaction Authority agreement is for the Space-Based Airborne Moving Target Indicator (SB-AMTI) program, which aims to develop and field a network of satellites carrying sensors that can continuously detect and follow airborne targets. The deal will allow the Space Force to field an AMTI constellation by 2028, Space Systems Command said in a press release.
Space Force officials also noted that this contract is only the first, and that it does not intend to rely just on SpaceX for this tracking constellation. It intends to use “a highly diversified pool of traditional and non-traditional vendors, each bringing various capabilities” to the system.
Regardless, SpaceX’s satellite division this week won two Pentagon contracts worth more than $6 billion. Not bad work if you can get it.
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Fancy new comment system. Anyway, with the kerfuffle around SpaceX’s IPO, and the concomitant fearmongering, this deal, the previous one, and the $1.25 billion SpaceX gets monthly from Anthropic should soothe the fears of anyone honestly concerned.
People still squawk
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/29/spacex-skeptics-concerned-as-musk-comments-diverge-from-ipo-filing.html
The more contracts he has with the military, the better. Less troublesome than stockholders.
Hatevestors like “Cards Against Humanity” are only the beginning.
This is a good development. But what I’d really like to see is an announcement that SpaceX has been made prime contractor and systems integrator for the entire Golden Dome project.
In the Ukraine war, Russia has yet to jam Starlink. At all. They did it once, for a short period of time, and could not do it again. Now, the so called Russian sympathizer Recently Elon has found a way to deny anyone access to Starlink, in either Ukraine or Russia, except for those on a list controlled by the Ukrainian government. Needless to say, this has given Ukraine a major advantage on the battlefield. Starlink survives against some of the best electronic warfare and hacking experts on Earth. This is stuff the Russians are known to be very good at, and they cannot do it. Their own equivalent to Starlink is grossly inferior and they know it. Anyway, if civilian Starlink is this good the military version (Starshield), should be an awesome asset to use against the Chinese
Note that SB-AMTI is most likely the reason the USAF is dithering about whether to replace its ancient 707-based E-3s with modern 737-based E-7s. If SB-AMTI can be made to actually *work*, then the US basically has 24/7 radar coverage over everything non-stealthy that flies. Over the whole planet. And the same tech, with additional AI (well, Automatic Target Recognition, which is a subset of AI that substantial progress has actually been made on over the years) processing, can probably do the same thing with anything non-stealthy that drives on the ground. And you can probably add Synthetic Aperture Radar to the list of capabilities for free. Oh, and ballistic missile tracking during the boost phase; combine that with cuing from SBIRS satellites to detect launch plumes, and you should have a fair idea of trajectory within a minute or two and a decent shot at pulling off an intercept.
In short, if this tech works, it’ll massively change how the military detects and tracks targets, and thanks to SpaceX’s ability to build satellites and place them into orbit en masse, it’ll be quite difficult for opponents to hide from or defeat. Imagine having thousands of Aegis-class radars covering every inch of the planet. The weakest point will probably be the software-based control system for the network.
The downside? If anybody starts using data on CONUS movements (legal restrictions or against it notwithstanding), it’s pretty easy to slide from there into dystopia.
Are you sure radar will be one of the sensors onboard these satellites? Source?
Watch some of the videos I linked to below. NoiseInSpace covers how the same transceivers that can relay data packets for a text or a phone call can also be used for SAR imagery. It’s all just radio waves, and the only hardware restrictions baked into the design are the frequency bands that each radio transmitter can operate in, and Starlink’s are adjacent to or overlap certain bands favored for use in radars. The rest can be altered by software.
Now, a dedicated radar sat would almost certainly use hardware that was better *optimized* for use in radar imaging as opposed to communications, but in the phased-array era of radio technology, the line between the two uses is thin, indeed, and almost any array can be dual-use just by changing the waveforms and power levels. As he points out, anybody with the gear and knowhow can observe any radio beams pointing in their direction, and so far nobody anywhere on the planet has announced that Starlink is transmitting the sorts of signals optimized for Detection And Ranging. Any widespread testing of those waveforms would probably get noticed and reported on rather quickly. So, it most likely hasn’t happened yet–but, it probably *could* be done with the V2 Mini, and it *certainly* could be done with the V3’s Direct-to-Cell antenna. Elon really likes the idea of trying to keep a firewall between civilian and military use (see: Starlink in Ukraine), so he’s more likely to offer the USSF a new, dedicated constellation of radarsats than to make V2s or V3s dual-purpose… but, on the other hand, he *could* if it became necessary, and given V3’s existing dual-purpose capabilities, there is no reason to believe that he couldn’t crank out dedicated radarsats just as quickly as V3s, because they’d be largely identical. All of the hard work has already been done.
Again, I recommend watching his videos. They’re highly technical, but he does summarize each point for us laymen as he goes.
Elon’s STARFALL
https://spacenews.com/faa-documents-outline-spacex-plans-for-starfall-reentry-vehicles/
Welp. This is a YT channel that has produced several highly-technical videos on radars in space, particularly with regards to Starlink V2 Mini and V3.
https://www.youtube.com/@NoiseInSpaceChannel/videos
tl;dw there are cute things that can be done with V2 Mini, but V3–especially its massive Direct-To-Cell antenna–can probably do AMTI, certainly do SAR (at better-than-KH-11-optical-resolutions), and with enough processing power could probably do GMTI. It could do all of this a lot better if it had a laser link to a massive constellation of orbital datacenters…. Oh, wait. And that’s with existing/planned commercial hardware, before you even get into dedicated military radarsats optimized for that purpose.
I’m not too concerned about Elon… but his successors, including several generations from now? That’s another story.
h/t https://instapundit.com/800328/#disqus_thread
Yes. Starlink/Starshield is an extant Transport Layer that already works and has withstood years of fierce attempts – all fruitless – to compromise it by the Russians, the PRC and likely others. These should be the backbone of the US military’s entire space-based asset inventory, especially Golden Dome.