For decades, military communications from space relied primarily on geostationary satellites positioned 22,000 miles above Earth. These distant spacecraft provide secure, reliable voice and data connectivity for United States defense operations worldwide, with a small club of operators — Intelsat, Viasat, SES and Eutelsat — dominating a market that has been dramatically disrupted by the rise of Starlink.
Starlink — SpaceX’s commercially successful constellation of thousands of satellites orbiting just a few hundred miles above Earth — has expanded its footprint in military operations under the name Starshield, introducing new capabilities that military planners find increasingly attractive: lower latency, greater redundancy and simpler user terminals.
As Starlink has gained market share, competing satellite operators have turned to consolidation for survival, driving major merger deals such as Viasat’s acquisition of Inmarsat and the proposed combination of industry giants Intelsat and SES.
Starshield’s ascendancy in the government sector also has pushed commercial satellite operators to respond with multiple strategic shifts: developing hybrid networks that combine different orbital capabilities, and focusing on niche military applications where they maintain competitive advantages. These pressures have created a complex ecosystem where companies are often simultaneously collaborating with and competing against Starlink, reflecting the reality that no single provider can address all military requirements.
Recent contract awards under the Proliferated Low Earth Orbit (PLEO) program run by the Space Force’s Commercial Satellite Communications Office tell a striking story: since the launch of the program in May 2024 through February 2025, Starshield has secured more than $300 million in task orders, dwarfing its closest commercial rival OneWeb, which has managed about $7.5 million.
While these numbers represent just a fraction of the Pentagon’s overall commercial satellite communications spending, they signal a profound shift in a sector where change typically happens at a glacial pace.
“Starlink is now seen as an indispensable asset throughout the entire government sector, from U.S. embassies to the battlefield,” read a report by the market research firm Quilty Space. It noted that “Starlink’s government sector momentum shows no sign of a slowdown.”
An evolving market
Executives from OneWeb, which serves the U.S. defense sector through its subsidiary Eutelsat America Corp. and OneWeb Technologies (EACOWT), as well as other satellite communications firms, acknowledge Starlink’s dominance.
But they argue that military needs are too diverse for a single provider to meet all requirements. They cite demands for highly encrypted tactical networks and for networks that can operate in radio frequency-congested environments, such as aircraft carrier decks during electronic warfare operations.
“Starlink is definitely winning a lot, but they’re not winning everything,” Ian Canning, president of EACOWT, told SpaceNews. “DoD likes to take advantage of commercial products, but sometimes they like products that are more tailored to their needs. And no one company can do everything.”
According to estimates by the Government Accountability Office, the Department of Defense spent $788 million on commercial satellite communications services in fiscal year 2023. The breakdown reveals the continued importance of traditional systems: 74.8% went to geostationary satellite services, 4.5% to medium Earth orbit satcom, and 20.7% to LEO satcom. While LEO services are growing, they haven’t yet displaced established technologies.
Canning said military requirements often extend beyond what commercial systems were originally designed to provide.
With a constellation of more than 600 satellites, OneWeb has been working to carve out its own niche by focusing on specialized military applications such as ship-based communications, which present unique challenges in the congested radio frequency environments typical of naval vessels. In a demonstration aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier, military personnel tested a Kymeta satellite terminal running OneWeb’s enterprise network, Canning said.
The trial took place late last year as part of the Navy’s Sailor Edge Afloat and Ashore (SEA2) program that aims to provide resilient global connectivity for warships.
Compared to Starshield, Canning said, OneWeb’s system demonstrated higher resilience when faced with radar interference and other electromagnetic disruptions.
“If a radar was going off, we were able to maintain communications,” he said. “We’re trying to show how we’re different, especially to challenging customers that operate in forward deployed areas with harsh environments.”
The Ukraine factor
The war in Ukraine has become a crucial testing ground for commercial satellite communications in conflict scenarios. Since Russia’s invasion in 2022, Ukrainian forces have extensively utilized Starlink satellite internet service for battlefield connectivity.
One notable application has been in drone warfare, where Starlink’s low-latency connections enable real-time control and coordination of unmanned aerial vehicles.
While the system has proven invaluable for military communications, it also created a strategic dependency on a single commercial entity whose access could be restricted by business decisions or geopolitical considerations.
OneWeb’s European parent company Eutelsat has been reportedly in discussions about providing satellite internet services to Ukraine. The European Commission proposed funding Ukraine’s access to space services from EU-based providers, including Eutelsat, to ensure continuous support for Ukraine’s military communications needs.
While Canning couldn’t comment specifically on corporate-level talks with the European Union, he noted that any expanded service in Ukraine would likely combine both LEO and GEO terminals rather than simply replacing existing Starlink hardware.
“If you become reliant on one thing, you leave yourself very exposed,” Canning said. “And I think there’s an acknowledgement of that within Ukraine, that they’ve become incredibly reliant on just one path, and if that path is at risk, they haven’t got a backup.
From competition to collaboration
Satellite operators, meanwhile, are finding ways to work with Starlink even as they compete against it.
Intelsat, a global operator of geostationary satellites since 1964, has become a Starlink reseller while also partnering with OneWeb. Rick Henry, vice president of business operations at Intelsat, oversees the company’s defense and government business and sees value in offering integrated solutions.
“SpaceX has helped us in a lot of ways,” Henry said. U.S. military users “now feel more comfortable with that kind of managed service.”
Intelsat has developed network virtualization software that allows satellite bandwidth from different constellations to be managed and allocated seamlessly. Units at military tactical operations centers may have multiple satellite antennas for different networks, but they can manage everything from a single laptop using this virtualization technology.
The company has also developed a ruggedized Starshield terminal the size of a small pizza box with onboard battery power — addressing a key limitation of standard terminals that require continuous AC power. The Intelsat terminal can run for hours on internal batteries and is designed to withstand harsh military environments where conventional hardware would fail due to dust and water exposure.
“Most DoD customers want multiple paths to transport when they’re going to these hostile environments,” Henry explained. “A lot of DoD users are buying a lot of Starshield but are wanting to add other orbits and security features.”
This hybrid approach — combining the strengths of different satellite systems operating in different orbits — appears to be the direction in which military satellite communications is heading.
Resilience comes not just from having thousands of satellites in a single constellation, but from having access to multiple constellations with different characteristics and vulnerabilities.
New entrants preparing to challenge Starlink
While Starlink currently dominates the LEO broadband market, new competitors are preparing to enter the field. Amazon’s Project Kuiper plans to launch its first batch of production satellites in the coming months, with services expected to begin in late 2025. The company aims to deploy a 3,232-satellite network and is already participating in studies with defense agencies such as the Defense Innovation Unit and the Air Force Research Laboratory.
Canadian satellite operator Telesat is about to start launching its planned 198-satellite Telesat Lightspeed LEO constellation, with global services projected to begin in 2027.
The company has established a U.S. proxy subsidiary specifically to work with DoD customers.
Charles Cynamon, president of Telesat Government Solutions, emphasized that while Lightspeed is fundamentally a commercial service, it will offer customized options for military customers with stringent security requirements. The company has been engaging with military satellite communications users for years to understand their needs and has participated in Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency studies on integrating commercial systems into hybrid networks.
“We’re not waiting until 2027,” Cynamon said. “We’re talking to the Space Force and the other services, especially those that build the government terminals, because we don’t want them to make irreversible decisions from a terminals’ perspective. We want them to keep an open mind that there’s going to be multiple providers when it comes to LEO.”
Telesat’s approach differs from both Starlink and Project Kuiper. Rather than deploying thousands of satellites in low orbits, Lightspeed will use fewer satellites positioned in higher LEO orbits, allowing each satellite to cover a larger area of the Earth’s surface.
“The military LEO satcom market is not a winner-take-all,” Cynamon said. “This is going to be a huge market. The government is looking for diversity, and we’re going to be one of the providers. We don’t have this ‘conquer the world, back a customer into a cul-de-sac and make them use our terminals’ approach. That’s not where we’re going with our market strategy.”
The military procurement landscape
The Department of Defense’s approach to satellite communications procurement is evolving alongside the technology. Clare Hopper, director of the Space Force’s Commercial Satellite Communications Office, said her organization is adapting contracts and processes to take advantage of the rapidly changing commercial landscape.
A GAO report published in March noted that “some of these efforts have seen positive outcomes, such as the military services’ rapid adoption of commercial LEO satcom services using CSCO’s new contract.”
For many years, the satellite communications industry complained that the Department of Defense was slow to adopt commercial technologies. That perception is changing, executives said, largely due to Starlink’s success in demonstrating the capabilities of commercial systems.
As commercial satellite systems take on more military communications roles, security against cyber attacks, jamming, spoofing and other forms of electronic warfare has become a requirement.
Starshield has addressed this by offering specialized security features beyond those available in the standard Starlink service. Other providers are following suit, developing military-specific capabilities that meet the Pentagon’s stringent demands.
Security standards for military satellite communications continue to evolve as threats become more sophisticated, Telesat’s Cynamon noted. “They’re going to evaluate our proposal on how well we are meeting those cybersecurity standards.”
The future of military satellite communications
As this market continues to evolve, several trends are becoming clear: LEO constellations are here to stay as a critical component of military communications; and hybrid networks combining satellites in multiple orbits are poised to become the norm rather than the exception. Each orbital regime offers different advantages and disadvantages, and military users will increasingly expect access to all of them as needed.
Further, the line between commercial and military satellite communications will continue to blur. Systems originally designed for civilian broadband will be adapted for military use, while military requirements will increasingly influence the design of commercial systems.
As the GAO noted in its recent report, the competition among providers will drive innovation, bringing new capabilities to market more quickly than would be possible under traditional military procurement cycles.
Starlink’s rise has accelerated changes that were already underway, forcing both competitors and the Department of Defense itself to adapt more quickly than they might have otherwise.
In this new landscape, no single provider dominates completely, but all must reckon with the standards that Starlink has established for speed, coverage and ease of use.
This article first appeared in the April 2025 issue of SpaceNews Magazine.
