The Pentagon needs what the company offers to compete with China even as it frets over its potential for dominance and the billionaire’s global interests.
For the first time, the Pentagon’s Space Development Agency used lasers transmitting data at light speed to communicate between military satellites on a secure network, making it easier to track enemy missiles and if necessary shoot them down.
It was a milestone not only for the Pentagon. This was a defining moment for a certain up-and-coming military contractor that had built key parts of this new system: Elon Musk’s SpaceX.
SpaceX over the last year started to move in a big way into the business of building military and spy satellites, an industry that has long been dominated by major contractors like Raytheon and Northrop Grumman as well as smaller players like York Space Systems.
This shift comes as the Pentagon and U.S. spy agencies are preparing to spend billions of dollars to build a series of new constellations of low-earth-orbit satellites, much of it in response to recent moves by China to build its own space-based military systems.