Last August, U.S. Navy officials carrying out a test of unmanned vessels realized they had hit a single point of failure: Starlink. A global outage across Elon Musk’s satellite network affecting millions of Starlink users had left two dozen unmanned surface vessels bobbing off the California coast, disrupting communications and halting operations for almost an hour.

The incident, which involved drones intended to bolster U.S. military options in a conflict with China, was one of several U.S. Navy test disruptions linked to SpaceX’s Starlink that left operators unable to connect ​with autonomous boats, according to internal navy documents and a person familiar with the matter.

As SpaceX rockets toward a $2 trillion public offering this summer — expected ‌to be ‌the largest ever — the company has secured its position as the world’s most valuable space company in part by being indispensable to ​the U.S. government with an array of technologies spanning satellite communications to space launches and military AI.