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Tag: Golden Dome

  • Trump’s Golden Dome Plan Could Launch New Era of Weapons in Space

    Trump’s Golden Dome Plan Could Launch New Era of Weapons in Space

    U.S. President Donald Trump’s Golden Dome missile defense concept revives a controversial, decades-old initiative whose ambitious construction could upend norms in outer space and reshape relations between the world’s top space powers.

    The announcement of Golden Dome, a vast network of satellites and weapons in Earth’s orbit set to cost $175 billion, could sharply escalate the militarization of space, a trend that has intensified over the last decade, space analysts say.

    While the world’s biggest space powers – the U.S., Russia and China – have put military and intelligence assets in orbit since the 1960s, they have done so mostly in secrecy.

    Under former President Joe Biden, U.S. Space Force officials had grown vocal about a need for greater offensive space capabilities due to space-based threats from Russia and China.

    When Trump announced his Golden Dome plan in January, it was a clear shift in strategy, one that emphasizes a bold move into space with expensive, untested technology that could be a financial boon to U.S. defense contractors.

    The concept includes space-based missiles that would launch from satellites in orbit to intercept conventional and nuclear missiles launched from Earth.

    “I think it’s opening a Pandora’s box,” said Victoria Samson, director of space security and stability at the Secure World Foundation think tank in Washington, referring to deploying missiles in space. “We haven’t truly thought about the long-term consequences for doing so,” she added.

    Samson and other experts said Golden Dome could provoke other states to place similar systems in space or to develop more advanced weapons to evade the missile shield, escalating an arms race in space.

    The Pentagon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

    Russia and China reacted differently to the latest news from Trump. A Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson said it was “seriously concerned” about the project and urged Washington to abandon its development, adding that it carried “strong offensive implications” and heightened the risks of the militarization of outer space and an arms race.

    A Kremlin spokesperson said Golden Dome could force talks between Moscow and Washington about nuclear arms control in the foreseeable future.
    Primarily seeking to defend against a growing arsenal of conventional and nuclear missiles from U.S. adversaries Russia, China and smaller states such as North Korea and Iran, the Golden Dome plan is a revival of a Cold War-era effort by former U.S. President Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), better known as the “Star Wars” program.

    SDI envisioned stationing a constellation of missiles and powerful laser weapons in low-Earth orbit that could intercept a ballistic nuclear missile launched anywhere on Earth below, either in its boost phase moments after launch or in its blazing-fast cruise phase in space.

    But the idea never came to fruition mainly because of technological hurdles, as well as the high cost and concerns it would violate an anti-ballistic missile treaty that has since been abandoned.

    ‘WE’RE READY‘

    Golden Dome has strong and powerful allies in the defense contracting community and the growing defense technology arena, many of whom have been preparing for Trump’s big move into space weaponry.

    “We knew that this day was likely going to come. You know, we’re ready for it,” L3Harris Chief Financial Officer Ken Bedingfield said in an interview with Reuters last month.

    “L3 Harris has an early start of building the sensor network that will become the foundational sensor network for the Golden Dome architecture.”

    Trump ally Elon Musk’s rocket and satellite company SpaceX has emerged as a frontrunner alongside software firm Palantir (PLTR.O) and drone maker Anduril to build key components of the system, Reuters reported last month.

    Many of the early systems are expected to come from existing production lines. Attendees at the White House press conference with Trump on Tuesday named L3Harris, Lockheed Martin (LMT.N) and RTX Corp (RTX.N) as potential contractors for the massive project.

    But Golden Dome’s funding remains uncertain. Republican lawmakers have proposed a $25 billion initial investment for it as part of a broader $150 billion defense package, but this funding is tied to a contentious reconciliation bill that faces significant hurdles in Congress.

    (Reuters)

  • What Is The Golden Dome Missile Defense Shield?

    What Is The Golden Dome Missile Defense Shield?

    U.S. President Donald Trump picked a design for his Golden Dome missile defense system and named a leader of the ambitious $175 billion defense program. Here are details on Golden Dome, where the idea comes from and how it will work.

    HOW WILL IT WORK?

    The aim is for Golden Dome to leverage a network of hundreds of satellites circling the globe with sophisticated sensors and interceptors to knock out incoming enemy missiles after they lift off from countries like China, Iran, North Korea or Russia.

    “I promised the American people that I would build a cutting edge missile defense shield to protect our homeland from the threat of foreign missile attack,” Trump said when he made the announcement on Tuesday.

    In April the Pentagon asked defense contractors how they would design and build a network to knock out intercontinental ballistic missiles during the “boost phase” just after lift-off – the slow and predictable climb of an enemy missile through the Earth’s atmosphere. Existing defenses target enemy missiles while they travel through space.

    Once the missile has been detected, Golden Dome will either shoot it down before it enters space with an interceptor or a laser, or further along its path of travel in space with an existing missile defense system that uses land-based interceptors stationed in California and Alaska.

    Beneath the space intercept layer, the system will have another defensive layer based in or around the U.S. This is something the Pentagon’s Missile Defense Agency looked intoduring the first Trump administration.

    IS GOLDEN DOME LIKE ISRAEL’S IRON DOME?

    “We helped Israel with theirs, and [it] was very successful, and now we have technology that’s even far advanced from that,” Trump said referring to Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system.

    The short-range Iron Dome air defense system was built to intercept the kinds of rockets fired by the Palestinian group Hamas in Gaza.

    Developed by Israel’s Rafael Advanced Defense Systems with U.S. backing, it became operational in 2011. Each truck-towed unit fires radar-guided missiles to blow up short-range threats like rockets, mortars and drones in mid-air.

    The system determines whether a rocket is on course to hit a populated area; if not, the rocket is ignored and allowed to land harmlessly.

    Iron Dome was originally billed as providing city-sized coverage against rockets with ranges of between 4 and 70 km (2.5 to 43 miles), but experts say this has since been expanded.

    HOW IS IT SIMILAR TO THEN-PRESIDENT RONALD REAGAN’S STAR WARS INITIATIVE?

    “We will truly be completing the job that President Reagan started 40 years ago, forever ending the missile threat to the American homeland,” Trump said on Tuesday.

    The idea of strapping rocket launchers, or lasers, to satellites so they can shoot down enemy intercontinental ballistic missiles is not new. It was part of the Star Wars initiative devised during the presidency of Ronald Reagan. But it represents a huge and expensive technological leap from current capabilities.

    Reagan’s “Strategic Defense Initiative,” as it was called, was announced in 1983 as groundbreaking research into a national defense system that could make nuclear weapons obsolete.

    The heart of the SDI program was a plan to develop a space-based missile defense program that could protect the U.S. from a large-scale nuclear attack. The proposal involved many layers of technology that would enable the United States to identify and destroy automatically a large number of incoming ballistic missiles as they were launched, as they flew, and as they approached their targets. SDI failed because it was too expensive, too ambitious from a technology perspective, could not be easily tested and appeared to violate an existing anti-ballistic missile treaty.

    WHO WILL BUILD GOLDEN DOME?

    Trump ally Elon Musk’s rocket and satellite company SpaceX has emerged as a frontrunner alongside software firm Palantir  and drone maker Anduril to build key components of the system.
    Many of the early systems are expected to come from existing production lines. Attendees at the White House press conference with Trump named L3Harris Technologies, Lockheed Martin and RTX Corp as potential contractors for the massive project.

    L3 has invested $150 million in building out its new facility in Fort Wayne, Indiana, where it makes the Hypersonic and Ballistic Tracking Space Sensor Satellites that are part of a Pentagon effort to better detect and track hypersonic weapons with space-based sensors and could be adapted for Golden Dome.

    But Golden Dome’s funding remains uncertain. Republican lawmakers have proposed a $25-billion initial investment for it as part of a broader $150-billion defense package, but this funding is tied to a contentious reconciliation bill that faces significant hurdles in Congress.

    (Reuters)