By joining forces with Ukrainian designers to craft next-generation drones and interceptors, SpaceX could take the worldwide lead in this sphere of defense technology. Shown here is the leading-edge but expensive $4 million American Patriot missile. (Photo by John Tlumacki/The Boston Globe via Getty Images)

Boston Globe via Getty Images

While Iran’s radical regime is threatening to strike the operations of trillionaire Elon Musk across the Mideast, SpaceX’s founder could swiftly turn the tables by teaming up with Ukraine’s defense-tech inventors to begin shooting down the Islamic Republic’s drones, says a world-leading space defense scholar.

On the eve of the SpaceX IPO that transformed Musk into the globe’s first trillion-dollar tycoon, an Iranian news organ aligned with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps issued a warning that his entire business empire has been placed on the military’s hit list.

That means not just the thousands of Starlink internet satellite terminals scattered across the region, but also SpaceX’s ground stations, and any outfit controlled by Musk’s AI start-up xAI or messaging platform X, could all hypothetically come under attack, says Brian Hurley, founder of the influential New Space Economy think tank and digital magazine.

Iran’s state news agency Fars claimed the American and Israeli militaries had been using SpaceX Starlink technology and even “Twitter software” in attacks on Iran, and vowed armed revenge.

“The Starlink ground station located in the occupied territories of Qatar, Jordan, the UAE, and Oman, along with the partners of SpaceX … are Iran’s new targets,” Fars said in a provocative threat.

Space scholar Hurley told me in an interview there has been no “clear public evidence that SpaceX or Starlink directly supported U.S. military communications, battlefield coordination, or targeting in specific operations against Iran.”

“Iran may be assuming or alleging this based on Starlink’s role in Ukraine,” adds Hurley, who chronicles the rising new space powers worldwide, and their strategic and diplomatic moves across the global geopolitical chessboard.

Just months after American intelligence agencies revealed that Moscow was secretly providing its defense partners in Tehran with pinpoint satellite-derived coordinates on the location of U.S. radars, space gear, jet fighters, troops and warships across the Middle East, Hurley says, “Russia could extend intelligence support to include SpaceX or Starlink-related infrastructure in the region.”

“Russia and Iran,” he adds, “are clearly deepening their military and strategic partnership against Western interests.”

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in a series of posts on the messaging platform X that the Kremlin’s joint development, with Iran, of bomb-tipped drones to hit Israeli, American and Arab outposts, along with providing real-time targeting intel, shows that Moscow aims “to effectively turn the Iranian regime’s strikes against its neighbors and American bases into a second front of Russia’s war against Ukraine and, more broadly, against the entire West.”

President Zelensky, a lodestar leader hailed across the European democracies, also wondered, on X, whether Vladimir V. Putin might send Kremlin combatants to aid in Iran’s defense.

Victoria Samson, chief director of space security at the globally influential defense think tank Secure World Foundation, in Washington, D.C., says while she agrees the Iran conflict could be morphing into a new front in the wider Russian-Iranian war with the West, dispatching Russian soldiers to face off against American forces might be too dangerously escalatory for Putin to risk.

One of the foremost experts in the U.S. on space defense and the predicted space wars of the future, Samson told me in an interview that Iran, while mirroring Russia’s battle tactics, is threatening to escalate the scale of assaults on SpaceX gear.

While Moscow has sought to obliterate Starlink terminals across Ukraine, she says, Iran appears to be preparing to target SpaceX stations throughout the entire Middle East.

During Zelensky’s epic leadership of Ukraine’s remarkable resistance to the invasion by gigantic Russia, it has emerged, almost miraculously, as a world power in drone warfare.

Across the country, tech wunderkinds directing aerial defense skunkworks have been inventing a fusillade of leading-edge drones, along with hit-to-kill interceptors to destroy the swarms of automated Russian-Iranian bombers that crash into Ukraine’s ancient cities nightly.

Zelensky has dispatched leading Ukrainian aces of drone battles, along with their anti-drone defenders, to help protect Mideast outposts targeted by Iran, even as their counterparts back in Europe begin training NATO forces in Denmark, Germany and Poland.

The commander of Ukraine’s fight to preserve its democracy and independence has opened the way to joint production, with liberal Allies, of remotely piloted compact aircraft for deployment across Europe and the Middle East.

“If Iran starts targeting SpaceX, Starlink terminals, or related infrastructure in the Middle East,” Hurley told me, “that would give both regional governments and SpaceX a stronger reason to consider Ukraine-style counter-drone defenses."

“Ukraine has developed practical experience using lower-cost interceptors, electronic warfare, sensors, and rapid adaptation against Shahed-type drone attacks.”

While American forces in the Mideast have been firing off high-tech but high-priced missile interceptors to destroy dirt-cheap Iranian drones bombarding Israel and the Arab allies of the U.S., along with U.S. radar installations and aircraft, there is a growing apprehension that these defenses could quickly be depleted.

Ukraine’s moderately priced interceptors and drones could provide a perfect solution, Hurley says.

“It makes little sense to rely mainly on $4 million [American] PATRIOT missiles or $12 million THAAD interceptors against much cheaper Iranian-Russian drones."

SpaceX and Elon Musk could initially press for the massive deployment of Ukrainian drones and interceptors to protect their outposts across the Gulf, Hurley says.

Yet the spacecraft superpower, with its world-leading expertise in aeronautical engineering, high-resolution sensors, constantly updated onboard imagery and map archives, and AI-enhanced automated flight and navigation, could join forces with Ukrainian designers to co-craft a torrent of increasingly sophisticated drones and interceptors.

The crystal-gazing Hurley predicts SpaceX could "enter into the business of building lethal autonomous drones and autonomous defense systems and also military robots.”

While Iran might be ahead, for the moment, with its stockpiles of explosive Shahed drones, SpaceX, with its just-realized $85 billion in IPO share proceeds, has a fantastical potential war chest to enter and win a drone arms race.

And even as Iran’s war-hit economy spirals downward, with just $375 billion in GDP last year, Elon Musk’s post-IPO fortune has skyrocketed to $1. 4 trillion, higher than the entire American Department of Defense budget for 2025.

Now, as Russia deploys jet fighters, missile brigades and bomber drones to destroy Starlink terminals across Ukraine, Iran aims to conduct similar blitzes on SpaceX stations all around its periphery.

“Iran’s threat does appear to follow the pattern Russia has used in Ukraine: treating commercial space infrastructure as part of the battle space.”

With the strengthening defense entente between Moscow and Tehran, space scholar Hurley says, “the space-enabled conflict model seen in Ukraine may now be spreading.”

“Commercial satellite networks are increasingly being treated as strategic infrastructure, not neutral background services.”

“That creates new risks for companies such as SpaceX,” he says, and “reflects a wider Iran-Russia convergence.”

With their parallel attacks on SpaceX, “both countries share an interest in reducing the military and political advantages the West gains from commercial space systems.”

Tehran’s revolutionary rulers are also sending out Russian-designed drones to locate Starlink stations that have been smuggled into Iran, and camouflaged while positioned on rooftops across the Islamic Republic. Possession of Starlink terminals is punishable by death, and Iran’s state media have already begun blasting out bombshell stories on Starlink owners being arrested in raids nationwide.

Meanwhile, although the United States and Iran have signaled they could sign a 60-day ceasefire pact in Switzerland this week, that should not lull the world’s wealthiest techno-aristocrat or his spaceflight outfit into a false sense of security.

“Even if a 60-day truce is signed, SpaceX and [Mideast] regional governments should still treat the Iranian threat seriously,” Hurley warns.

“A truce reduces immediate risk, but it does not remove the need for contingency planning.”

If SpaceX races forward at its usual rocket-speed tempo in co-designing, with its Ukrainian allies, next-generation armadas of interceptors and drones, “SpaceX could become a very significant player in autonomous drone defense,” Hurley predicts.

“SpaceX already has deep experience in autonomous [flight] operations, real-time control systems, rapid software iteration, AI-enabled engineering, resilient communications, and large-scale manufacturing.”

“Those are exactly the kinds of capabilities that matter in counter-drone defense, where the challenge is not simply intercepting one drone, but detecting, tracking, prioritizing, and defeating large numbers of low-cost autonomous threats at scale.”

“SpaceX also has existing relationships with governments, militaries, and strategic customers through Starlink, Starshield, launch services, and national-security space work.”

“That gives it a potential path into the market that many defense startups do not have.”

“Ukraine’s battlefield experience would be very important,” he says.

“If SpaceX combined Ukrainian operational lessons with its own strengths in autonomy, AI, communications, and scalable engineering, I think it could potentially dominate the autonomous drone defense market.”