SpaceX Just Became the Military Backbone. The Question Is Who Controls the Trigger.

The number nobody is leading with is 6.45 billion dollars.

That is what the Space Force handed SpaceX in the span of 72 hours at the end of May. On May 26, it awarded the company $2.29 billion to build the backbone of its new Space Data Network. Three days later, on May 29, it awarded SpaceX another $4.16 billion to build the satellite constellation that will track airborne threats anywhere on Earth. Same company. Same week. One architecture.

The $4.16 billion figure is real. But the right number is the combined bet: $6.45 billion in three days, awarded to a single company, to build the entire sensor-to-shooter loop for the United States military's most sensitive aerospace tracking mission. The Space Force is not buying a product. It is buying a backbone.

The program is called SB-AMTI — Space-Based Airborne Moving Target Indicator. The satellites, to be built on SpaceX's Starshield platform (the government variant of its Starlink constellation), will detect and track fighter aircraft, bombers, cruise missiles, and potentially hypersonic weapons from low Earth orbit. The contract was announced on May 29 by Space Systems Command, using an Other Transaction Authority agreement designed to accelerate deployment.

The contract comes with a vendor pool — nine companies selected in April 2026 to compete for future work. Colonel Ryan Frazier, the acting Space Force portfolio acquisition executive for space-based sensing and targeting, was quick to emphasize this is not a sole-source arrangement. We will not leverage any one single provider, he said. But the first award is SpaceX's, and it is large enough to set the technical standard for everything that follows.

There is context that makes this more than a procurement story. The Space Development Agency spent years building a multi-vendor architecture for exactly this mission — proliferated constellations of data transport and tracking satellites from York Space Systems, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and Rocket Lab. SDA has contracts for approximately 340 satellites across that effort. But the program stalled. The Government Accountability Office cited technical problems and supply chain bottlenecks that slowed development. And now, instead of continuing to debug a distributed multi-vendor approach, the Pentagon has handed the keys to the company that already has 10,000 satellites in orbit.

SpaceX knows this playbook. Starlink has been used in combat — documented by Reuters, the Washington Post, and other outlets, with Ukrainian forces relying on it for battlefield communications. Russia declared at the United Nations in October 2022 that Western commercial satellites could be legitimate military targets — a position that has aged into the present tense as the geopolitical stakes around SpaceX's role have only sharpened. The Congressional Research Service has separately noted that future Starshield satellites in SDA's program may carry interceptor missiles, hypersonic projectiles, or directed energy weapons, not just sensors. The tracking layer is here. The weapons layer is speculative — but it is in the documents.

Colonel Frazier said the initial constellation would be fielded by 2028. That is an aggressive timeline. But the direction is clear regardless of whether that date holds.

There is also the IPO. SpaceX is targeting a valuation north of $1.75 trillion in its initial public offering. The timing of these contracts — awarded weeks before the expected filing — is almost certainly not coincidental. Government contracts of this size and sensitivity are credibility anchors for a listing. The Pentagon just certified SpaceX as critical national security infrastructure, which is a powerful message to institutional investors evaluating whether to buy in at that price.

The structural question is harder than any individual contract. When a private company controls the sensing layer, the communications layer, and — according to some projections — the weapons layer of a military tracking network, what governance exists? The contracts are public. The technical specifications are not. SpaceX's degree of autonomy in target selection, data routing, and network operation is not something the Space Force has made transparent, and there is no obvious regulatory framework governing a private company's role in orbital fire control.

This is not science fiction. The infrastructure is being built. The contracts are being signed. The timeline is 2028. And the company building it has a founder who has shown, repeatedly, that he is willing to use the networks he controls as instruments of geopolitical leverage.

The good news, if there is any, is that the Space Force recognizes the concentration problem. Frazier said the vendor pool exists precisely to avoid single-provider dependency. But the first award went to SpaceX, the terms are Other Transaction Authority (fast, flexible, less oversight), and the $6.45 billion figure is not a down payment on a competitive ecosystem — it is a down payment on an architecture. Whatever comes next will be built on top of what SpaceX delivers in 2028.

You do not need to believe SpaceX is a bad actor to find this worth watching. You just need to believe that critical military infrastructure should probably not be owned by a single company with a demonstrated willingness to turn switches off when it feels like it. The question is not whether SpaceX will do something reckless with this capability. The question is who would know if it did, and what recourse exists if it does.