With US strike drones over Iran relying on Starlink for guidance, SpaceX has told the Defense Department the current $5,000-per-terminal rate undervalues what the network is actually doing.
SpaceX has told the US Defense Department that it should be paying around $25,000 per terminal for the Starlink links guiding American strike drones over Iran, rather than the roughly $5,000 it pays now, according to a Reuters exclusive on Tuesday.
Senior SpaceX officials reached the conclusion as US kamikaze drones using the network began to log visible operational gains against Iranian targets, the report said.
The dispute centres on the network’s role in guiding LUCAS suicide drones, a cheaper US analogue of Iran’s Shahed-136 family of loitering munitions. The drones depend on Starlink’s satellite Wi-Fi for guidance updates and post-strike confirmation.
SpaceX’s pricing argument is that the Pentagon is effectively consuming a service tier closer to $25,000 per terminal than to $5,000, because of the network latency, redundancy and bandwidth headroom required for that workload. The Defense Department has, per the report, pushed back.
