President Trump next week will consider three options for his Golden Dome missile-defense project, said a defense official who added that DOD might create an office to build the ambitious, futuristic missile shield.
A “tiger team” drawn from various defense and military agencies is putting together options of varying scope and complexity, but all will likely require more coordination than today’s Missile Defense Agency can offer, the official told Defense One on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.
“You probably would need to come up with a new organization to handle that,” the official said.
Two other sources familiar with the discussions said a new office is already in the works, with a list of candidates being drawn up to lead it.
The Pentagon is still in the early stages of determining how to pursue what would be the most ambitious missile-defense project in history.
The Golden Dome effort will likely include near-term goals—such as improving the accuracy and effectiveness of ground-based missile interceptors—that can be completed before the 2026 midterm elections, enabling the White House to claim some quick success. More ambitious efforts are likely to take at least five to seven years to arrive, like satellites that track, analyze, communicate about, and destroy incoming missiles, according to the defense official.
The Pentagon has received more than 360 responses to a request for information posted last month. These have included ideas for new sensors, encryption, satellite technology, and more; as well as larger concepts that would integrate technologies and products from multiple companies, the defense official said.
These ideas will eventually inform the requirements and formal program, sources said.
Two of the companies are Lockheed Martin and Booz Allen Hamilton, company representatives confirmed. Others include RTX and Boeing, according to a former senior defense official familiar with the Pentagon’s deliberations on Golden Dome.
The former official and an industry expert said SpaceX—a launch provider that also builds satellites—would also be well-positioned to compete for the program. But they could not say whether Elon Musk’s company would compete. A former senior official said the project might be unattractive to the company since it would do little to enhance SpaceX’s other businesses.
On Thursday, Booz Allen Hamilton officials spoke to reporters about their “Brilliant Swarms” idea: a networked constellation of thousands of satellites flying in 20 orbital planes some 300 to 600 kilometers up. Each would have artificial intelligence to make sense of data from many sources: their own sensors, ground radars, the Space Development Agency’s nascent tracking constellation, and more.
“This network of low-Earth orbit satellites works together, operating autonomously to detect, track, and intercept ballistic missiles just minutes after launch, neutralizing the threat before warheads deploy—and with a much higher probability of success,” company officials wrote on their website this week.
“We would have the ability to track any and all ballistic missiles from birth to death,” Booz space chief Chris Bogdan told Defense One.
Each satellite—weighing between 40 to 80 kilograms and about the size of a “small refrigerator”—would also be a kill vehicle, able to take out an incoming missile by crashing into it, Bogdan said.
At those speeds, a field of plasma would form around the speeding satellite, increasing the energy it would release upon impact with the missile, said Trey Obering, a Booz Allen Hamilton senior executive advisor and former Missile Defense Agency director, citing the company’s tests.
About 40 percent of the satellite “will burn up coming back into the atmosphere,” he said. The majority of the rest of it—plus the plasma field—would strike the target, while “about 2 percent actually could make it to the ground in some kind of debris,” he said.
Booz officials believe that if they win the contract, they would be able to demonstrate the concept in space against multiple “uncooperative” targets by the fourth year of the program, and reach initial operating capability within five to seven years.
But the former senior defense official and an industry expert familiar with the Pentagon’s deliberations said the entire Golden Dome project, as conceived, still suffers from a big flaw: scale. Even with thousands of interceptors in space, missiles will always be easier and cheaper to build on the ground, they said. So an adversary could always build more missiles than there would be interceptors to take them out.
