Starship Mask to be turned into military spaceship

The Pentagon has approached SpaceX about potentially taking over Starship for sensitive and potentially dangerous missions as a government-owned, government-operated asset instead of contracting the company to launch payloads.

The company has been exploring its options in responding, Gary Henry, a senior adviser with SpaceX, told the audience at the Space Mobility Conference here Jan. 30, Aviation Week reports.

SpaceX is already on contract for development of the Department of the Air Force’s Rocket Cargo mission, with the goal of delivering cargo point to point through space. But this is beyond that plan, Henry says.

“We have had conversations … and it really came down to specific missions, where it’s a very specific and sometimes elevated risk or maybe a dangerous use case for the DOD where they’re asking themselves: Do we need to own it as a particular asset … SpaceX, can you accommodate that?” he says.

“We’ve been exploring all kinds of options to kind of deal with those questions,” he says.

The idea is similar to how the Air Force moves cargo. At times, the service contracts with private carriers to deliver cargo, but for certain critical missions it uses service “gray tail” aircraft. In this hypothetical case, the military could take a Starship off the line for a specific mission and return it to SpaceX after it is complete.

Col. Eric Felt, director of space architecture for the Office of the Secretary of the Air Force for Space Acquisition and Integration, says there are certain concepts of operation that could be relevant for a government-owned, government-operated space vehicle.

“If we can buy the commercial service, that’s what we’re going to do, but there might be some use cases where there needs to be a government-owned, government-operated [vehicle] and that transfer can happen on the fly,” Felt says.