Tesla Inc (TSLA)

[boston745]

Incidently, as shown in this article, the US would have violated the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty. Thankfully for those who were opposed to said treaty, 911 happened 2 months after this article and gave the US justification to leave said treaty so it didnt violate it.

U.S. Plans to Test Space-Based Laser To Intercept Missiles
By Vernon Loeb July 18, 2001

A top Pentagon official said today that the Bush administration plans to test a space-based laser interceptor as early as 2005 as part of its ambitious new missile defense agenda.

Robert Snyder, executive director of the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization, told reporters at a missile defense conference here that $110 million has been included in the fiscal 2002 defense budget to study technologies, including the space-based laser, aimed at hitting missiles in their "boost" phase three to five minutes after launch.

While deployment of space-based missile defenses would be a clear violation of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, it is not clear whether an initial test of the technology would violate the pact. According to interpretations ive read, anything outside the lab setting is a violation of the treaty.

Bush administration officials, in any event, told Congress last week that their missile defense plans, which call for possible "emergency" deployment of ground-, air- and sea-based defenses by 2004, could violate the ABM Treaty within months.

So you can see the US would have violated the ABM treaty withing months. Bush was able to declare US intention of leaving the treaty (Dec 13th, 2001) because of the events on 911. Thus he was able to use that 110m earmarked for 2002 in the second half of 2002 after the treaty officially ended (June 13th, 2002). It just so happens SpaceX began operations June 2002 coinciding with the official ending of the treaty.

If deployed, space-based lasers would be mounted on satellites. Snyder said the test envisioned for 2005 or 2006 most likely would involve launching a prototype laser into space and then firing it back at a target in the earth's atmosphere.

"It's not clear we know how we're going to do that," Snyder said, speaking at the conference sponsored by the U.S. Army Space and Missile Defense Command.

In the first Bush administration, a space-based missile defense initiative known as "Brilliant Pebbles" was considered but abandoned. It envisaged between 3,600 and 4,000 satellites armed with space-based interceptors.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2001/07/18/us-plans-to-test-space-based-laser-to-intercept-missiles/bc260e2c-e060-4e9e-9e7c-dec68e104433/

"While Starlink is designed for consumer and commercial use, Starshield is designed for government use, with an initial focus on three areas," the page adds. Those areas are Earth observation, communications and hosted payloads (the ability to put a wide variety of instruments on the Starshield satellite bus).

Starshield will offer a higher level of security than Starlink, featuring "additional high-assurance cryptographic capability to host classified payloads and process data securely, meeting the most demanding government requirements," according to SpaceX's Starshield page.

https://www.space.com/spacex-starshield-satellite-internet-military-starlink

SpaceX, L3Harris win missile-warning satellite contracts from US military
https://www.space.com/spacex-l3harris-missile-warning-satellite-contracts