In the recent turn of events, Italy’s largest and well known bank Intesa Sanpaolo SpA has shocked everyone after the reports of its investment in Elon Musk’s Space Exploration Technologies as the Italian bank perceives it’s connection with the aerospace industry as a game changer of global growth.
In a state on Friday, Italy’s largest domestic bank said that innovation will be play a defining role in the 2022-2025 business plan, without revealing the amount of the new investment.
Alongside its high-profile chief and owner, the company has not been prevented from controversy. In 2022, Musk’s company’s sparked controversy in Ukraine by denying a government request to provide Starlink coverage to Crimea to help a naval drone attack on Russian targets.
In a first, the SpaceX has also signed its initial contract for Starshield, the defense realm of its Starlink satellite internet service, from the U.S. Space Force.
A U.S. Air Force representative told Bloomberg that the contract which will last one year will have a maximum value of $70 million. He said that the contract “provides for Starshield end-to-end service via the Starlink constellation, user terminals, ancillary equipment, network management and other related services. It was given on September 1.
SpaceX will be mandated to have received $15 million by the end of this month, and the contract is likely to assist more than 50 mission partners across all arms of the U.S. military.
Satellite-based communications systems — and especially Starlink — came into the spotlight in the early days of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, when SpaceX provided their service in Ukraine and allowed large shipments of the Starlink terminals for use by civilians and the Ukrainian military.
But Starlink’s part in Ukrainian defense was questioned by many , majorly by SpaceX CEO Elon Musk himself. While Musk seemed to support sending Starlink terminals to the Ukrainian military at first, it was later revealed that he refused to activate the service when Ukraine requested it prior to a planned attack on Russia’s navy.
Starshield, announced last December, will hopefully clear up much of the ambiguity around using a commercial service in war operations. When the company announced Starshield, it noted on its website that the service “leverages SpaceX’s Starlink technology and launch capability to support national security efforts,” though providing scant other details.
However, while SpaceX had not commented on the new contract, Musk posted on X that the division between Starlink and Starshield as providing services to its civilian as well as defense customers is “the right order of things.”
SpaceX is a private company that is valued at around $150 billion. The precise terms of the investment by the Italian bank were not revealed before public.
SpaceX has a paramount technological lead and is way ahead of its rivals in the commercial space industry, but the satellite making company has been notorious for perhaps controversial reasons in the recent past.
Musk has held his hopes high on Starship, a powerful rocket he dreams to use to send humans to Mars and start a city, which blasted up during a test in April and alerted government watchdogs like the Federal Aviation Authority to carry out an investigation into the matter.
