Trump’s call for ‘Golden Dome’ missile-defence system gets 360 company replies

President Donald Trump’s vision of protecting the US with a “Golden Dome” missile-defense system drew more than 360 company concept papers that Pentagon analysts are studying as they rush to come up with a workable plan as early as the next fiscal year.

Trump has compared the idea in his Jan. 27 executive order to Israel’s Iron Dome system, which defends a much smaller country, and to President Ronald Reagan’s unfulfilled quest for a space-based missile defense system that was widely known as “Star Wars.”

Options are due to the White House by early April. “Once we finally get the ‘table slap’ that says ‘this is the path we’re going on,’ we are prepared to start moving on Day One,” Air Force Lieutenant General Heath Collins, director of the Missile Defense Agency, said in an interview.

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“We still need cash, we still need funding,” Collins added. “The executive order called for us to bring forward the architecture options, implementation plans and a coordinated Defense Department and Office of Management and Budget plan to fund it all.”

The cost is unknown. Dov Zakheim, who was Pentagon comptroller under President George W. Bush, estimated in a recent editorial that the project could cost as much as $100 billion annually through 2030. The sheer size of a system to cover the continental United States, Alaska and Hawaii is just one of many logistical challenges the Pentagon is asking for company advice to solve.

Collins said a classified “Industry Day” last month drew 560 representatives from 182 companies and 13 Defense Department agencies. Topics in industry abstracts ranged from supply chain management to terrestrial sensor improvements. They also touched on the most controversial and least proven technology — space-based interceptors that would require new satellite designs.

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Citing classification guidelines, Collins declined to name any companies that have made initial pitches for a role in the project, which has drawn interest well beyond the old-line defense contractors.

Startup’s Idea

Ursa Major, a startup, was part of six teams that have submitted abstracts and briefed the Missile Defense Agency on the company’s work on rocket motors and on its Draper hypersonic engine, Chief Executive Officer Dan Jablonsky said in an interview.

Jablonsky said the Draper engine, which is configured to use storable liquid fuel, could be prepositioned on Pacific islands, ships or vehicles to allow US forces to respond rapidly to enemy strikes. He said the engine also could be stored in space for 10 years to support space-based interceptors.

Praising the agency for moving speedily, Jablonsky said the Pentagon’s customary “prescriptive” approach would mean “two or three years of studies and them telling you exactly what to build. And they don’t know what they need yet. But if industry brings a capability that fits a need and fits a purpose, why not just take that and write the requirements around that?”

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One measure of the new project’s scale: Since 2002, the Missile Defense Agency has spent more than $194 billion, including $10.4 billion for fiscal year 2022, to equip operational commanders with the current, less ambitious system intended to detect, track and destroy a limited number of incoming North Korean or Iranian ballistic missiles, the Government Accountability Office said in a 2023 report. The agency’s full fiscal 2025 request is $10.4 billion.

“We are in full planning mode,” General Michael Guetlein, Space Force vice chief of space operations, told a Reagan Institute innovation conference this month. “Without a doubt, our biggest challenge is going to be organization, behavior and culture,” he said, because Golden Dome will rival the “magnitude of the Manhattan Project” that developed the atomic bomb.