The president of the United States, Donald Trump, chose a design for his Golden Dome antimile defense system and appointed a leader of the ambitious defense program of $ 175 billion. Here are details about Golden Dome, where the idea comes from and how it will work.
How will it work?
The goal is for Golden Dome to take advantage of a network of hundreds of satellites that surround the world with sophisticated sensors and interceptors to eliminate incoming enemy missiles after they take off from countries such as China, Iran, North Korea or Russia.
“I promised the American people to build an avant -garde antimile defense shield to protect our homeland from the threat of a 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 eliminate intercontinental ballistic missiles during the “impulse phase” just after takeoff: the slow and predictable rise of an enemy missile through the earth’s atmosphere. Existing defenses point to enemy missiles while traveling through space.
Once the missile has been detected, Golden Dome will shoot it before entering space with an interceptor or a laser, or more along its travel path in space with an existing antimile defense system that uses terrestrial interceptors parked in California and Alaska.
Under the spatial interception layer, the system will have another defense layer based on or around the US. This is something that the Pentagon Antimisile Defense Agency analyzed during the first Trump administration.
Is Golden Dome as the iron dome of Israel?
“We help Israel with yours, and [it] He was very successful, and now we have technology that is even very advanced of that, “Trump said, referring to the Iron Dome Antimisile Defense System of Israel.
The short -range Iron Dome Air Defense System was built to intercept the types of rockets fired by Hamas in Gaza.
Developed by Rafael Advanced Defense Systems of Israel with the support of USA. UU., In operation in 2011. Each unit touched in truck triggers radar -guided missiles to exploit short -range threats such as rockets, mortars and drones in the air.
The system determines whether a rocket is ongoing to reach a populated area; If not, the rocket is ignored and allowed to land harmlessly.
Iron Dome was originally announced as a coverage of the size of the city against rockets with ranges between 4 and 70 km (2.5 to 43 miles), but experts say this has been expanded since then.
How is it similar to the Star Wars initiative of then President Ronald Reagan?
“We will really complete the work that President Reagan began 40 years ago, ending forever the threat of missiles for the American homeland,” Trump said Tuesday.
The idea of binding rocket launchers, or lasers, satellites so that enemy intercontinental ballistic missiles can tear down is not new. He was part of the Star Wars initiative designed during the presidency of Ronald Reagan. But it represents a huge and expensive technological leap of current capacities.
Reagan’s “strategic defense initiative, as it was called, was announced in 1983 as an innovative investigation of a national defense system that could make obsolete nuclear weapons.
The heart of the SDI program was a plan to develop an antimile defense program based on space that could protect the United States from a large -scale nuclear attack.
The proposal included many layers of technology that would allow the United States to automatically identify and destroy a large number of incoming ballistic missiles as they launched, as they flew, and when they approached their goals.
Sdi failed because it was too expensive, too ambitious from a technological perspective, could not be easily tested and seemed to violate an existing anti-Balistic missile treaty.
Who will build Golden Dome?
The company of rockets and satellites of Trump’s ally Elon Musk, Spacex, has become a favorite along with the Palantir software firm and the Anduril drones manufacturer to build key system components.
Many of the first systems are expected to come from existing production lines. The White House Press Conference with Trump called L3Harris Technologies, LockHheed Martin and RTX CORP as possible contractors for the massive project.
L3 has invested $ 150 million in the construction of its new facilities in Fort Wayne, Indiana, where it manufactures the satellites of hypersonic and ballistic tracking sensors that are part of an effort of the Pentagon to detect and trace better hypersonic weapons with space -based sensors and could adapt to Golden Dome.
But Golden Dome’s financing is still uncertain. Republican legislators have proposed an initial investment of $ 25 billion for it as part of a larger defense package of $ 150 billion, but this financing is linked to a draft bill of controversial controversy that faces significant obstacles in Congress.
