SpaceX wins Pentagon deal to test Starlink lasers for missile tracking

The Space Development Agency has awarded SpaceX a $9.9 million contract to study whether the company’s commercial “Plaser” laser terminal can be used on the Pentagon’s missile warning and tracking satellites. The deal, announced by the U.S. Department of War on Nov. 10 and awarded on Nov. 9, covers a risk reduction study, delivery of representative hardware, and support for integrating the terminal into missile warning and tracking systems, with options that could raise its value to $12.7 million.

SpaceX will do the work at its headquarters in Hawthorne, California, and in Redmond, Washington, where the company runs its Starlink satellite engineering, and is scheduled to finish by Oct. 7, 2027. The full $9.9 million comes from fiscal 2026 research, development, test and evaluation funds and was obligated at the time of award. The agency bought the study through its Systems, Technologies, and Emerging Capabilities broad agency announcement, an open solicitation that accepts proposals throughout the year, so the number of competing bids is not known.

Plaser, short for SpaceX’s “Plug and Plaser” product, is the optical inter-satellite terminal developed for the Starlink constellation and offered to outside satellite operators. SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell announced the commercial offering in March 2024, telling Reuters it was a departure for a company that usually builds its own systems end to end.

“We generally don’t sell components, so this is a little bit of a new thing for us,” said SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell.

Laser links matter to the Space Development Agency because its Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture relies on hundreds of small satellites in low Earth orbit that pass data to one another by light rather than radio. The agency’s Tracking Layer satellites, which carry infrared sensors to detect and follow ballistic and hypersonic missiles, use optical communication terminals to send their data through the Transport Layer’s mesh network to ground stations and weapon systems. Optical links carry more data than radio links and are harder to detect or jam, but they demand precise pointing between fast-moving satellites.

The SDA has set its own optical communication terminal standard and tests vendors’ terminals for interoperability at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory. As of March 2024, SpaceX had not put its commercial terminals through that testing, while four other suppliers, Tesat-Spacecom, Mynaric, Skyloom and CACI/SA Photonics, had passed, Space Intel Report wrote at the time. The contract announcement does not say whether the new study will test Plaser against the SDA standard, or whether the terminal would fly on Tracking Layer satellites themselves or connect them to another network.

SpaceX has publicly released few specifications for Plaser. The company’s smaller Starlink “mini laser,” which satellite builder Muon Space agreed in October 2025 to integrate into its Halo platform, is rated at 25 gigabits per second over distances of up to 4,000 km (2,485 miles), with higher speeds at shorter range.

The study is small next to SpaceX’s other recent military space work. In May 2026, the U.S. Space Force awarded the company a $2.29 billion fixed-price agreement to build the backbone of its Space Data Network, a proliferated low Earth orbit constellation meant to carry data from missile warning and tracking sensors to interceptors for the Golden Dome missile defense effort. The service requires a fully operational prototype by the end of 2027, Reuters reported, and said the network would work alongside the SDA’s Transport Layer.

SpaceX also launches much of the SDA constellation. The company holds task orders under the U.S. Space Force’s National Security Space Launch program, including the $5.9 billion launch deal the Pentagon awarded in 2025, and has carried several batches of SDA Transport and Tracking Layer satellites into orbit on Falcon 9 rockets.

The Tracking Layer itself is growing quickly. In December 2025, the SDA awarded four agreements worth about $3.5 billion for 72 Tranche 3 Tracking Layer satellites, 18 each from Lockheed Martin, Rocket Lab USA, Northrop Grumman and L3Harris Technologies, for launch starting in fiscal 2029. Each of those satellites carries optical communication terminals alongside an infrared payload, Ka-band communications and an S-band backup command link.

The announcement does not say which tranche or which tracking satellite design the Plaser study is meant to support. It also does not say what the “representative hardware” will be, or whether the agency plans a follow-on purchase if the study succeeds. Those answers would come after the study ends in October 2027, about 18 months before the first Tranche 3 tracking satellites are due to launch.