USAF officially interested in SpaceX’s upcoming line of suborbital strategic transport shuttles.

Excuse me: ‘Starships.’

“The Department of the Air Force seeks to leverage the current multi-billion dollar commercial investment to develop the largest rockets ever, and with full reusability to develop and test the capability to leverage a commercial rocket to deliver AF cargo anywhere on the Earth in less than one hour, with a 100-ton capacity,” the document states.

To give you an idea of what that means: that’s about 71% the capacity of a Lockheed C-5M Super Galaxy military transport plane… but much, much faster. The USAF isn’t looking for assault shuttles (dammit); but they likely are looking for things that can be converted into emergency transport in, well, an emergency. I suspect SpaceX will be happy to make that easier for them, too. It rarely hurts to have the US military owing you a favor.

Moe Lane

If you are wondering whether there will be any successful pushback on SpaceX’s plans to blanket orbital space with its cheap wireless communications network :looking at the Ars Technica article again: …yeah, I don’t think that’s a high-probability scenario just right now.