Tests of unmanned vessels last year by the US Navy found that reliance on SpaceX’s Starlink created a single point of failure that brought the reliability of such an arrangement into question, Reuters reported, citing internal Navy documents and an unnamed person.
In August, a Starlink outage that affected millions of customers left Navy unmanned surface vehicles without communications links for almost an hour, the report said.
Naval drones
The Navy uses Starlink to connect to small unmanned maritime vessels that look like speedboats without seats, including units made by Maryland-based BlackSea and Austin-based Saronic.
An earlier test in April 2025 involving unmanned boats and flying drones found that Starlink struggled to provide the necessary data throughput to handle multiple systems, an internal Navy safety report reportedly said.
“Starlink reliance exposed limitations under multiple-vehicle load,” the report stated, also finding issues with radios provided by Silvus and a network system provided by Viasat.
Single point of failure
Another test prior to the August 2025 outage was disrupted by intermittent communication issues with the Starlink network, Navy documents reportedly said.
US Defence Department chief information officer Kirsten Davies said the “Department leverages multiple, robust, resilient systems for its broad network”.
After benefiting from the US government’s shift toward developing commercial space capabilities, SpaceX now holds a near-monopoly on space launches that it has used to build up its Starlink network.
The company is expected to hold an IPO this year.
