Dawn is yet to break over the Sea of Japan when the sensor snaps into action. Hovering 22,000 miles above Earth, the car-sized SBIR (Space-based Infrared System) pings.
Sensitive enough to see a single lighted match from 200 miles, it has just detected North Korea’s launch of a ballistic missile.
Within three seconds, sirens blare 6,000 miles away inside Buckley Space Force base in Aurora, Colorado – home of the Aerospace Data Facility.
Within three minutes, the national security advisor rushes into the Oval Office and hands the president a phone with the secretary of defense and joint chiefs of staff on the line from the Pentagon.
They tell him the US is under attack.
A nuclear warhead strike on Washington DC would immediately cremate two million people within a nine-mile radius. The retaliatory strikes launched by the US would kill millions more in North Korea and likely neighboring China. Russia, spooked by American ballistic missiles flying overhead en route to Asia, would launch its own nuclear onslaught on the US.
Yet now, instead of unlocking the nuclear football, the president activates the Golden Dome.
Missiles fired from orbiting silos destroy the North Korean weapon, which breaks up and disappears into the vast beyond. Americans, blissfully oblivious to the drama above their heads, only learn of the incident the following morning, as the news anchors inform them over a bowl of cornflakes.
This is Donald Trump’s dream.
On January 27, he issued an executive order to make it reality.
The Defense Department is now weighing up competing proposals for bringing the vision to life and is expected to issue an announcement in the coming weeks.
Elon Musk’s SpaceX was reported, on April 17, to be a frontrunner to win a crucial part of the program, in conjunction with Peter Thiel’s data analysis company Palantir and Palmer Luckey’s drone building firm Anduril. All three Silicon Valley giants are big donors to the Republicans: Luckey’s sister Ginger is married to MAGA star Matt Gaetz.
Musk denied wanting to be involved, tweeting that same day: ‘SpaceX has not tried to bid for any contract in this regard. Our strong preference would be to stay focused on taking humanity to Mars. If the President asks us to help in this regard, we will do so, but I hope that other companies (not SpaceX) can do this.’
Few believe he would not participate, at least in the launch of satellites to bolster the existing surveillance constellation.
The companies reportedly met with top officials in the Trump administration and the Pentagon recently to pitch their plan, which supposedly entails building and launching anywhere from 400 to over 1,000 satellites to circle the globe and track enemy missiles, per Reuters. Separately, 200 additional satellites, armed with US missiles that are not operated by the tech visionaries, would strike projectiles out of the sky.
The White House’s executive order demanded ‘capabilities to defeat salvoes prior to launch,’ meaning that some space-based missiles would be used to destroy projectiles on the launchpad.
Geosynchronous satellites, moving at the same speed as the Earth so effectively hovering in place, could be stationed above known adversaries – North Korea, Iran, Russia, China – to strike before takeoff occurred.
Other space-based missiles could take out the enemy missile seconds after it launched: a comparatively easy time to destroy it, when it is moving at lower speeds and its rocket burn makes it highly visible.
Destroying the missile in its mid-phase is complicated, experts say, with the missile flying at 15,000 mph, it cannot be seen by satellites but only by radars on the ground. Eliminating the missile after it enters its terminal phase, plummeting to Earth at 4.3 miles a second, is more difficult a feat than hitting a bullet with a bullet.
And, beyond the logistical issues, there’s the question of who will operate the system, and how.
Sources told Reuters that Musk was allegedly angling for a subscription model, whereby the US government would pay regular fees to his company for the use of the satellites.
Mark Montgomery, a retired rear admiral who now works at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, said that a subscription service was a non-starter.
‘If you’re going to compete for this, we’re going to have control of the satellites,’ he said.
‘But really, he doesn’t need to compete in this. There’s lots of other companies out there doing it.
‘Is he going to launch most of the satellites? Yes, but that’s about it. He is not going to be involved in the operations of the missiles, unless he decides to get heavily involved in this, and he’s pretty late.’
Existing defense companies including Northrop Grumman, Boeing, RTX and Lockheed Martin are all said to be putting together proposals for the Pentagon, which has reportedly received interest from more than 180 firms. On April 30, the department of defense will host a gathering of potential contractors at the Von Braun Complex in Huntsville, Alabama.
Montgomery believes a Golden Dome is long overdue.
‘Over the last 20 years, our adversaries have created the capabilities to place the US homeland at risk in a way that we haven’t experienced since the Civil War,’ he said. ‘We have not stepped up to address the challenge. We don’t have good situational awareness tools. We don’t have good tracking tools, and we certainly don’t have good engagement tools.’
Now, Montgomery said he believed the technology was in place, and the project finally feasible.
‘Reagan wanted to do it, but it was prohibitively expensive and the technology wasn’t there yet,’ he said.
Indeed, Trump is not the first president to envisage a giant dome above the country, protecting America from all attacks.
In March 1983, President Ronald Reagan announced in an Oval Office address his plan for a Strategic Defense Initiative, which he said was needed to protect the US from Soviet nuclear missiles.
‘What if free people could live secure in the knowledge that their security did not rest upon the threat of instant US retaliation to deter a Soviet attack, that we could intercept and destroy strategic ballistic missiles before they reached our own soil or that of our allies?’ he asked.
Reagan warned of ‘probably decades of effort on many fronts,’ with ‘failures and setbacks.’
‘But isn’t it worth every investment necessary to free the world from the threat of nuclear war?’ he entreated a weary public and his critics.
Joe Biden, elected to the Senate in 1972, was among the skeptics, arguing Reagan’s ‘Star Wars’ program would set off an arms race and that the proposal ‘constitutes one of the most reckless and irresponsible acts in the history of modern statecraft.’
Then again, Biden is infamous for being ‘wrong.’ ‘I think he has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades,’ former Defense Secretary Robert Gates said of Biden in his 2014 book.
Nevertheless, Biden’s side won out: Reagan’s program was mothballed in 1993, with the end of the Cold War.
But Trump appears set on making the Gipper’s wish come true and he has set an astonishing timeline to do so: The Pentagon has created several timelines for ‘capabilities to be delivered,’ Reuters reported on April 17, with one demanding implementation by early 2026.
Trump himself indicated his impatience, telling a West Palm Beach rally in June 2024: ‘By next term we will build a great Iron Dome over our country.’
The main risk of this plan is that Trump could look for an easy win, rather than working for a lasting answer, said Montgomery, who warned against wasting funds on existing, soon-to-be outdated technology, instead of reaching for an ambitious but lasting solution.
‘He’s going to want something to show that he did something right now. And he’s got to withhold that. He’s got to ignore that desire, and instead, think about the wisdom of a long-term solution.’
Indeed, as Reagan and now Trump have discovered, the plan provokes passionate responses.
‘Strategically, it’s always been stupid,’ said John Tierney, who spent 18 years in Congress before becoming the executive director at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation.
He argued that it disrupted a delicate balance, with no world power currently wanting to risk annihilation by attacking another, and gave a false sense of security.
‘We’ve spent about $410 billion since Ronald Reagan’s days on this thing,’ he said. ‘And we spend now about $30 billion a year on missile-related adventures.’
Tierney said such defense goals were pure fantasy: In 2017, the Missile Defense Agency announced that fewer than 40 percent of interceptions were successful when tested against North Korean-style weapons. The Chinese and Russians have more sophisticated equipment, making the chance of interception even lower.
His organization has calculated that you would need 950 interceptors to shoot down one North Korean missile. The American Physical Society estimated over 1,000 per missile.
‘A more generous reading would be that every politician wants people to think that they’re doing something for them, and that they can protect them,’ Tierney said.
‘One current member of Trump’s cabinet – high ranking, inclined towards the intelligence field – said to me, when that person was still a member of Congress: ‘I understand what you’re saying, John, about the facts. It doesn’t work, but I’ve got to tell my people I’m doing something.’
He added, ‘A more realistic reading – even though it’s totally cynical – is that there’s a lot of money to be made. It used to be the Boeings and the Lockheed Martins. Now it’s the techies. It’s the Elon Musks who would stand to make a ton of money.’
Tierney’s team has projected the cost to be over $2.5 trillion. On Thursday, Reuters reported that Republicans in Congress are seeking $27 billion in initial funding for Trump’s Golden Dome.
Tom Karako, director of the missile defense project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, believes the Golden Dome is essential, and put the price well below Tierney’s estimate.
‘It’s hard to know what it will cost,’ he told the Lawfare podcast. ‘I would not be terribly surprised if we were looking at perhaps a $10 billion-a-year increase. An extra $10 billion is going to go fast, even if you are constrained and conservative in terms of what you are trying to defend, from what.’
Karako argued that Iran’s missile attacks on Israel in April and October 2024, and Russia’s ongoing onslaught against Ukraine, showed how vital missile defense is. He described it as ‘deterrence of shenanigans and aggression by the bad guys.’
‘The purpose of missile defense is not to sit and play catch. It’s not simply to defend,’ he said.
‘Its job is to defend long enough to bring your diplomatic, military, economic – various other tools in the broad national toolbox – to bear.
‘Long enough to get your bombers off the ground, or your ships out of port. You’re not going to be able to do it indefinitely. But you may be able to do it long enough so that China is aware it’s going to pay a very heavy price for doing that sort of an attack.
‘People talk about a cyber–Pearl Harbor. I worry about an actual Pearl Harbor.’