US military documents have disclosed that Elon Musk’s SpaceX is working with the Pentagon on developing the capacity to rocket a “quick-reaction force” of troops and weapons anywhere in the world within the hour — with a special eye to deploying in Africa.
The documents, released to US investigative journal The Intercept after a Freedom of Information Act application, show that the US Transportation Command — responsible for moving personnel and materiel around the world — is working on using SpaceX’s prototype Starship rocket to get boots on the ground on the far side of the planet within 60 minutes.
The 120m tall, six-rocket-engined Starship, designed to carry more than 100 tonnes of cargo into low Earth orbit, is still in its demonstration phase. But on May 5 2021, SpaceX conducted its fifth high-altitude test to apogee at 10km altitude, then computer-guided the spacecraft safely back to a tail-first vertical landing at Starbase in Texas, all within six minutes.
Though the partnership was announced in October 2020, with army general Stephen Lyons saying the aim was to move the equivalent payload of a C-17 Globemaster military transport plane worldwide in a fraction of the time, the Pentagon’s emphasis was on shifting “critical logistics” and “humanitarian aid” — with only a vague passing reference to unspecified “personnel”.
But the documents acquired recently by The Intercept include a 2021 “Midterm Report” on the project that states that not only could a fleet of military Starships move logistics swiftly in sensitive theatres such as the Pacific Rim around China, but could also be used to fly entire prefab airfields to remote locations.
“But the third imagined use case,” wrote The Intercept’s Sam Biddle, is more provocative and less prosaic than the first two, titled only “Embassy Support”, scenarios in which a “rapid theatre direct delivery capability from the US to an African bare base would prove extremely important in supporting the department of state’s mission in Africa”, potentially including the use of a “quick-reaction force”, a military term for a rapidly deployed armed unit, typically used in crisis conditions.
Biddle speculates that the embassy support scenario — while not fleshed out — is based on fear of a repeat of the 2012 insurgent attack on the US embassy in Benghazi, Libya, in which ambassador J Christopher Stevens and three other Americans were killed when the flown-in rapid-reaction force failed to arrive in time.
But the “African bare base” reference suggests other African scenarios. US military planners have often spoken of an African “arc of instability” across the Sahara and Sahel, holding that failed and unstable states in this region incubate terrorism.
This is against a backdrop in which Africa’s second-most powerful armed force after Egypt, according to Global Firepower’s 2022 rankings, the SA National Defence Force, can barely fly its own troops into battle, a critical equipment shortage that cost 13 lives when it could not timeously fly in reinforcements to the Central African Republic nine years ago.
The SA Air Force has only two airworthy Hercules C-130 transports and no midair refuelling tanker aircraft, veteran defence correspondent Helmoed-Römer Heitman tells Business Day, and so has zero troop airlift capacity for missions deeper into Southern, Central or East Africa. “SA’s vision as a regional player is therefore not realistic,” he says.
A sci-fi “Starship Troopers” rapid-deployment capability has long been the dream of the US military, with defence contractor Douglas Aircraft pitching a project for “intercontinental ballistic transport” by rocket of 120 tonne payload “comprised of both troops and cargo” as far back as 1964. Curiously, their proposed — but never built — rocket looked superficially much like Starship.
Biddle warned that all four other high-altitude Starship tests before the successful fifth test had exploded catastrophically, so the dream may still be a long way off. Yet US Transport Command spokesperson John Ross told Biddle that though the project was “explorative in nature” at this point, he was confident that a rapid-response force deployment by orbital rocket would be “possible within the next five to 10 years”.
Other experts were wary. William Hartung of defence watchdog the Quincy Institute recalled prior Pentagon obsessions with far-fetched space tech such as the Reagan-era Star Wars missile defence shield. Kaitlyn Johnson of the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ Aerospace Defence Project questioned the practicality of landing the world’s largest spacecraft in an urban setting.
Greater concerns than coming up with a viable proof of concept may bedevil the project. The documents show that US Transport Command is wrestling with the question of how overflown countries might view the status of a spacecraft traversing the legally ill-defined boundaries between nationally controlled airspace and low Earth orbit.
Perhaps more worryingly, Brian Weeden of space governance think-tank Secure World Foundation, cautioned that a hostile country might mistakenly regard an overflying Starship “as a weapon or ballistic missile threat”. Not a pleasant prospect given the nuclear tensions over the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
• Schmidt is a veteran investigative journalist and Africa correspondent.
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