The Starshield name was publicly announced December 2022, however in 2021, Starshield had already entered a $1.8 billion classified contract with the U.S. government, revealed in 2023. As early as 2020, SpaceX was designing, building, and launching customized satellites based on variants of the Starlink
satellite bus for the
National Reconnaissance Office (NRO). meet in April 2019 In October 2020, SDA awarded SpaceX an initial $150 million
dual-use contract to develop 4 satellites to detect and track ballistic and hypersonic missiles. The launch was rescheduled multiple times but it eventually launched in April 2023. In 2020, SpaceX hired former four-star general
Terrence J. O'Shaughnessy who according to some sources is associated with Starlink's military satellite development and according to one source is listed as a "chief operating officer" at SpaceX. While still in active duty, O'Shaughnessy advocated before the
United States Senate Committee on Armed Services for a layered capability with lethal follow-on that incorporates
machine learning and
artificial intelligence to gather and act upon sensor data quickly. As of 2024, Terrence O’Shaughnessy reportedly has had a high-level role at Starshield. As
Starlink was being relied on in the Russo-Ukrainian war, expert on battlefield communications Thomas Wellington argued that Starlink signals, because they use narrow focused beams, are less vulnerable to interference and jamming by the enemy in wartime than satellites flying in higher orbits. Although there is no lethal weapons being developed this technology is being used by the military and it "can be integrated onto partner satellites to enable incorporation into the Starshield network." Therefore, if the military needed the use of SpaceX satellites through the Starshield program SpaceX "currently has over 3,000 satellites in low Earth orbit that beam the signal back to users' receiver dishes." Another Starshield contract was announced in September 2023, involving communications-focused services for U.S.
Space Systems Command. This contract with the US Space Force plans to provide customized satellite communications for the military. This is under the Space Force's new "Proliferated Low Earth Orbit" program for LEO satellites, where Space Force will allocate up to $900 million worth of contracts over the next 10 years. Although 16 vendors are competing for awards, the SpaceX contract is the only one to have been issued to date. SpaceX responded that they were in full compliance with their U.S. government contracts. SpaceX had notified the Select Committee a week earlier that they were misinformed, but the Select Committee "chose to contact media before seeking additional information [regarding Starshield military use in Taiwan]". In the context of military communication satellites, Col. Eric Felt, director of space architecture at the office of the assistant secretary of the Air Force for space acquisition and integration, said that there are plans to acquire at least 100 Starshield-branded satellites for this purpose by 2029. He said that while the military is an active user of SpaceX's commercial Starlink service, they also want to take advantage of the company's dedicated Starshield product line. Clare Hopper, head of the Space Force’s Commercial Satellite Communications Office (CSCO) stated that demand for Starlink's commercial service is "off the charts" and that currently all of their supported users are still using the commercial Starlink satellite constellation, but that the DoD has "unique service plans that contain privileged capabilities and features that are not available commercially". ==Space-to-ground signal==