President Trump speaks alongside the Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth in the Oval Office on May 20, 2025, announcing plans for the “Golden Dome”, a national ballistic and missile cruise system.
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President Trump unveiled an ambitious plan on Tuesday to protect America from the missile attack by building what he describes as a “golden dome”.
“Once fully built, the Golden Dome will be able to intercept the missiles even if they have been launched from other sides of the world and even if they have been launched since space,” Trump told journalists in the oval office.
Trump’s budget and calendar for the project are ambitious. He told journalists that he hoped to have done it “before the end of my mandate”. The system would cost about $ 175 billion, said the president, with $ 25 billion to start construction in next year’s budget.
A key element of the Trump plan is to place both satellites of missile detection and destructive missiles in orbit above the earth. The constellation would probably involve thousands of small satellites capable of attacking a missile in the moments after its launch since its submarine or its silo.
Such a large network of satellites would have been unthinkable just a few years ago, but it now seems at least theoretically at hand. Elon Musk Spacex has used low -cost rockets to launch a constellation of internet transmission satellites called Starlink. SpaceX says that the Starlink system currently has around 7,000 orbit satellites, a scale comparable to most estimates of what a limited space defense capacity would require.
“The overall effort of the golden dome has been expected for a long time,” said Tom Karako, director of the anti -missile defense project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Karako concedes that the spatial interception of incoming missiles is a “difficult problem”, but he says that the reality is that the next Great War will probably be carried out in part above the earth’s atmosphere. Given this reality, he thinks that Golden Dome’s abilities will provide a robust defense in the United States which could also be used for the anti-satellite war if necessary.
“It is necessary to face many things that are in space and to cross space,” he said.
Spatial anti -missile defense has been a dream of politicians for decades. In 1983, Ronald Reagan announced plans for a system to intercept the missiles of the Union of the time.
“I know it’s a great task, which may not be accomplished before the end of this century,” said Reagan at the time. “It will take years, probably decades of efforts on many fronts.”
In the end, the Soviet Union collapsed before everything approaching Reagan’s vision could be achieved, but the anti -missile defenses have progressed. American missiles Patriot have worked for decades to intercept short-term missiles, and the United States now have several systems capable of intercepting ballistic missiles in medium and intermediate range. He also has a small number of interceptors capable of hitting ICBMS in the middle of their flight. This capacity is intended squarely to North Nuclear Korea.
Other countries, namely Israel and Ukraine have used anti -missile defenses to protect themselves from attacks in recent years.
The American army has anti -missile defense systems on the ground and at the sea. The golden dome would expand its range in space.
Leah Garton / American anti -missile defense agency
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Leah Garton / American anti -missile defense agency
But the interception of intercontinental ballistic missiles in large numbers remains a much more difficult problem. The ICBMs launch out from the deep enemy territory and cry to the earth at hypersonic speeds, which makes them almost impossible to knock at the end of their flight. They can also deploy lures that can deceive the interceptors. The best time to hit them is that they only get started from their silos, but it requires an extremely fast response by space interceptors. Thousands of interceptors must be launched to ensure that you pass over a missile when it was launched.
The question of whether the technology has happened in fact is far from clear.
An orbital system would be complex, expensive and ultimately vulnerable to counterattack, warns Laura Grego, a physicist at the Union of Scientists concerned, a skeptical group on the development of anti-missile defense. Grego says that a network like Golden Dome could be defeated by the clustering is launching to overwhelm the system or by attacking the satellites themselves. The United States has recently accused Russia of having studied how to place nuclear warheads in orbit. Such a warhead could eliminate large sections of any golden dome system in space.
And the threats facing the United States is more diverse than ever. A recent report by the Defense Intelligence Agency has shown that Golden Dome should also face new threats and emerging such as cruising missiles, hypersonic missiles that can boast the edge of space and weapons known as fractional orbital bombing systems, which can start, slide through part of an orbit around the earth, then attack any direction.
The overall price of Golden Dome is far from certain. While the president said it could be done for $ 175 billion over three years, a recent estimate of the congressal budget put the cost between $ 161 and $ 542 billion over two decades. In addition, Senator Tim Sheehy, R-Mont., Who directs a “Caucus of the Dome of Gold”, recently told a crowd that “it will probably cost in billions of dollars if and when the golden dome is finished” Spatial news.
Given the potential high costs, Grego hopes that the congress will look carefully before giving money to the Trump administration to continue the system. The road to anti -missile defense “is strewn with programs that have been launched and abandoned after a number of years,” said Grego. “I would say asking the difficult questions at first, before following this road.”
