Calls for the United States to nationalise SpaceX, the rocket and satellite operator founded by Elon Musk, resurfaced on 20 October 2026 after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said limits on Starlink and its military counterpart Starshield were stopping his forces from intercepting Russian attacks. The row ran between Kyiv and Washington across the weekend, with US Secretary of State Marco Rubio denying that the US government caused the service problems, according to Yahoo Finance.
Key facts
- Zelenskyy said Ukraine cannot use Starlink or Starshield on its own territory to shoot down jet-powered Shahed drones, Yahoo Finance reported.
- He said he was told the restrictions were down to technical issues, although the systems appeared to be working normally across the European Union.
- Ukraine’s Defence Ministry has tried to contact SpaceX about the problem without success, according to the same report.
- Rubio said Starshield is not available to Ukraine at this moment and that the US government was not responsible for the outage.
- In a separate interview with the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera, Zelenskyy said reduced Starlink speed and narrowed intelligence sharing are now a reality rather than a threat, as reported by شبكة تواصل الإخبارية.
- Critics responded by reviving demands that Washington take SpaceX into public ownership.
Why it matters
Yahoo Finance frames the dispute as a question about private control of critical military technology. The practical signal for every other Starlink customer is narrower and sharper: a government at war says its connection degraded, says it was told the cause was technical, and says it could not get an answer from the operator — which is a service-assurance problem as much as a geopolitical one, because the same single company owns the satellites, the ground network and the decision to throttle. For governments, airlines, shipping lines and rural ISPs now buying capacity from one dominant constellation, the episode strengthens the case for contractual guarantees and a second supplier, and gives smaller operators a commercial argument they have not previously been able to make. It also feeds back into how the Starlink cuts intersect with SpaceX’s valuation, since the company’s worth rests heavily on being the default provider.
What Zelenskyy said
Speaking in an online exchange with reporters, Zelenskyy said the drones in question fly and can be stopped with aircraft and other air defence, but not with Starlink, Yahoo Finance reported, citing CBS News.
In the Corriere della Sera interview, his first with an Italian outlet, Zelenskyy said Ukraine had simply been told to stop and called the situation unjust, according to شبكة تواصل الإخبارية. That outlet reports the slower connection is already affecting operations while Russian strikes continue, and that Zelenskyy tied it to the defence of Ukraine’s energy infrastructure. Kyiv has said separately that the reduced speeds have still not been fully restored.
He also said he had asked Trump for interceptors if allies could not stop Russian President Vladimir Putin, and that the missiles were not given. He said he remains grateful to the American people and the Trump team, still regards Trump as an ally, and yet believes Trump’s choices push Ukraine towards capitulation.
The interview followed what the outlet calls the “patto del diesel” between Trump and Putin, which Zelenskyy said had begun Putin’s progressive exit from isolation. He said a proposed summit would involve the United States, Russia and China.
Washington’s response
Rubio said Ukraine’s use of Starshield is still under discussion, Yahoo Finance reported. He also said he was not sure Zelenskyy knew what he was talking about — the sharpest line yet in the public clash between Rubio and Zelenskyy.
The two accounts disagree on cause: Zelenskyy says restrictions on intelligence sharing and Starlink speed are in place and unfair, while Rubio says the US government did not cause the outage and casts doubt on Zelenskyy’s description of it. Both can only be reconciled by SpaceX, and SpaceX has said nothing — no statement from the company appears in either report, and starlink-news could not obtain one.
The nationalisation argument
Yahoo Finance quotes Lindsay Beyerstein, an investigative journalist and staff writer for the US magazine In These Times, who wrote on Bluesky: “We’ve got to nationalize SpaceX.” She argued the US military cannot operate without the company and cannot trust it to serve the national interest.
Ben Burgis, a columnist for the magazine Jacobin, questioned why a company whose growth was supported by taxpayer money should stay entirely privately owned, and said vital satellite internet infrastructure should not be controlled by a single ultrawealthy individual, the same report says.
Yahoo Finance reports there is no established plan for federal ownership, and that any takeover would have to settle shareholder compensation and decide whether Washington could acquire specific military assets instead of the whole company. Brian Wang of the tech newsletter NextBigFuture is cited noting the enormous taxpayer cost involved.
How much the Pentagon relies on SpaceX
About 20% of SpaceX’s revenue comes from US government contracts, down from more than 80% in the early 2020s, Yahoo Finance reports, citing regulatory filings and The New York Times. It says the US military still leans on contractors such as Boeing and Lockheed Martin, but that SpaceX has become particularly important for satellite communications and national security launches.
The underlying award documents give the clearest independent measure of that dependence. Air & Space Forces Magazine, cited in the report, says SpaceX received most of the $660 million in orders awarded under the Space Force’s Proliferated Low Earth Orbit programme as of 2025, despite 20 approved vendors. In the Space Force’s April 2025 National Security Space Launch Phase 3 Lane 2 round, SpaceX was picked for 28 of 54 planned missions under a contract worth up to $5.9 billion, with 19 going to United Launch Alliance and seven to Blue Origin. The Wall Street Journal, also cited, reports SpaceX more recently secured $4.2 billion to develop hundreds of missile-tracking satellites for the Pentagon’s Golden Dome programme.
Background
The idea of a state takeover is not new. Yahoo Finance notes that during Musk’s public feud with Trump last year, former Trump adviser Steve Bannon floated using the Defense Production Act to place SpaceX under temporary government control.
شبكة تواصل الإخبارية adds that Zelenskyy spoke after a phone call with Papa Leone XIV about evacuating civilians trapped in Russian-occupied territories, including residents of Oleshky left without food, placing the communications and air-defence dispute in the same wartime frame.
Sourcing note
This report rests on two secondary accounts — Yahoo Finance, which cites CBS News, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and Air & Space Forces Magazine, and شبكة تواصل الإخبارية, reporting Zelenskyy’s Corriere della Sera interview. Two financial claims should be read as reported rather than verified: Yahoo Finance says SpaceX listed on the Nasdaq in June with a record-breaking initial public offering and has since reached a market capitalisation of roughly $2 trillion, while other coverage has put the figure nearer $1.77 trillion. starlink-news has not inspected the regulatory filings or Space Force award notices behind the contract numbers above, and has no response from SpaceX.
Frequently Asked Questions
Which satellite operators could compete with Starlink for military work?
Yahoo Finance names SES, Iridium Communications and Viasat as established satellite communications providers, but reports that none currently matches Starlink’s scale. It puts the constellation at more than 11,000 satellites in low-earth orbit as of October 2026, a figure starlink-news has not independently confirmed.
Is Starshield the same service as Starlink?
No. Yahoo Finance describes Starshield as the military counterpart to the commercial Starlink network, sold to government and defence customers rather than to consumers, which is why access to it is decided in Washington rather than by a subscriber signing up.
Does any US law let Washington take ownership of SpaceX?
Yahoo Finance reports that the Defense Production Act lets the federal government direct private industry towards defence priorities but confers no blanket authority to seize ownership of a company. Any forced transfer would also run into Fifth Amendment questions over just compensation for shareholders.
Does this dispute affect ordinary Starlink subscribers?
Neither of the reports underpinning this story describes any change to retail or business service; the complaint concerns battlefield use inside Ukraine and access to Starshield. Zelenskyy said the systems appeared to be working normally across the European Union.
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