Initially, Reuters published an article about the relationship between SpaceX and the Pentagon, which the billionaire - traditionally for his relationship with this publication — called fake. Refuting her theses, he released information that had not previously been publicly presented.
The British news agency Reuters is known for its regular publications that are at odds with reality. This happens especially often when it writes about Elon Musk or his companies. That's what happened this time: the agency wrote that the head of SpaceX allegedly demanded that the Pentagon increase the fee for satellite control for American LUCAS kamikaze drones by five times. The military, according to the agency, resisted, but were forced to agree.
Musk noted in his social network X that everything was fundamentally different. In fact, the US military first controlled its disposable LUCAS drones (a smaller American copy of the Iranian Shahed, with reduced technical characteristics) using the Starlink network. This not only directly contradicts the Starlink user agreement (the head of the company emphasized this point), but also is not very honest commercially. The fact is that Starlink is a large civilian network with many millions of customers. Therefore, the cost of connecting to it is low. But for the military, SpaceX offers a significantly more expensive and less numerous network of Starshield satellites. Naturally, the price of drone control is much higher for her than for a civilian Starlink: after all, Starshield has few customers (in fact, one). This means that unit costs are higher.
The head of the company blamed the temporary use of Starlink on the drone company. It was probably easier for her that way. The US military also did not want to fix the error at first, noting that terminals on drones can connect to both the cheaper Starlink (for five thousand dollars per month per drone) and Starshield (for 25 thousand). Under normal circumstances, the topic did not come up, because kamikaze drones are not very actively used outside of the war.
As far as can be understood, Musk does not deny that shortly after the US attack on Iran, SpaceX employees met with representatives of the Pentagon. The company insisted that it was necessary to pay the same amount for satellite communications on a drone as for a similar one on a military aircraft, and not just five thousand dollars. The military tried to claim that the prices for aircraft communications are too high to pay the same amount for a drone that uses satellite communications for hours or even minutes — the benefit is that it flies once for the entire cycle of its existence.
The military's position can be understood, since LUCAS is almost as cheap as their Iranian prototypes — only 35 thousand dollars. Paying almost the same amount for communication for such a car as for the car itself is really not a common solution. But SpaceX is a monopolist, all the other space players on Earth combined are much weaker than it. Therefore, in the end, the Pentagon had to agree to the demands of Musk's people.
Although this photo has been processed, the massive launches of Starlink satellites do indeed produce whole strings of objects visible from the Ground.
Image source: starwalk.medium.com
It's hard to say how much we can trust the Reuters description of the issue, as the agency treats Musk and everything related to him extremely poorly. But according to this agency, the military, led by US Deputy Secretary of War Steve Feinberg, who had his arms twisted, was upset. In April, they also tried to meet with retired four-star general of the US Air Force Terrence O'Shaughnessy, who now works in the military section of SpaceX. However, so far there are no signs that all these complaints and meetings have yielded anything.
Rather, on the contrary: The Pentagon is considering the acquisition of more than 3,500 new subscriptions to Starshield. It is estimated that this deal could give SpaceX an additional hundreds of millions of dollars per year. And all this despite another smoldering price scandal, this time with Starlink land terminals.
It is claimed that since the beginning of the year, the United States has somehow sent six thousand Starlink terminals to Iran, and also allegedly asked SpaceX to provide direct satellite communications for some phones in Iran. At the moment, only this company has the technical ability to communicate with an ordinary modern smartphone via satellite, no one else has such working technologies. However, they are still operating in test mode at SpaceX. The American military planned to pay for all this themselves. But shortly after the US attack on Iran, the company said it wanted more for these services — in its opinion, the Pentagon was underpaid again.
Reuters tried to show that Musk acted like a greedy gambler here. Last year, he received $11.4 billion in revenue from Starlink (several Roscosmos budgets), with the vast majority of this money coming from millions of civilian customers. And they offered to pay the military for these services 0.5 billion for its activation in Iran, plus 0.1 billion per month for maintaining this function. It also upset the U.S. Department of War. Whether Musk managed to negotiate these terms is unknown to Reuters.
Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell responded to the Reuters article with a Twitter post saying, "This fake news agency has misunderstood what happened again. SpaceX remains a strong and valued partner of the Ministry of War. The theses in this article are simply not based on reality and do not reflect the close and effective cooperation between us."
At the same time, this reaction is quite emotional and may indicate that not all of these articles are made up. One cannot disagree, for example, with the following thesis: "No other company provides a comparable alternative to Starlink, which has become an increasingly critical tool in modern warfare since the outbreak of the war in Ukraine in 2022."
SpaceX is currently trying to block the military use of Starlink in Ukraine to control drones, the very service for which they received money from the Pentagon during the attack on Iran. The terminals that the Ukrainian Armed Forces place on UAVs are blocked when they exceed the speed limit of 90 kilometers per hour or are over Russian territory. But there are a number of means by which these prohibitions can be circumvented in border areas, which is why Starlink terminals are periodically found on low-speed Hornet-type drones ( "Martian-2" in the designations of the Russian army air defense). Fortunately, due to the workaround nature of such a solution, it is not widespread.
Attempts by other countries to create an analogue of Starlink today are extremely far from success. The satellites of this grouping have lower orbits, therefore, there is a much lower lag in control. It is difficult to aim a drone at a moving target such as an army truck or tank with a large lag. All other satellite groupings in the world are so much inferior to Starlink in terms of numbers that their orbits are higher, and the number of satellites in line of sight over one or another part of the front is significantly lower.
