SpaceX will team up with Armed Forces for War Games in April

MELBOURNE, Fla. - SpaceX is getting ready to show the U.S. military that their network of satellites could be lethal.

In early April, SpaceX, the U.S. Air Force, and the newly created U.S. Space Force will team up to conduct war games to practice intercepting an enemy missile and a drone.  The Defense Department says the test will also include submarines, battleships, and space-based weapons. 

"In the military art, you never want to look up and see the enemy, you want to look down, so looking up into space, we need to have literally the high ground," said Dr. Robert Taylor, who teaches air and space history at Florida Tech.

Eventually, SpaceX wants to grow the Starlink constellation to have more than 40,000 satellites orbiting the earth, so you can imagine the potential strategic advantage -- if the military could tap into those.

SpaceX has worked with the military before, for instance, sending up the top-secret Zuma spacecraft in 2018.  The military is also in talks with Virgin Orbit to participate in the upcoming exercise.  Dr. Taylor says this upcoming drill is a response to Russia and China who are integrating military might with space technology. 

"Any nation that has a space capacity could potentially be a space adversary." Dr. Taylor said.

Dr. Taylor said sci-fi predicted a lot of this would happen in the future.  The future is now.