More than 300 companies in discussions in connection Space Force’s “Golden Dome” project
According to guarded remarks by the head of Trump’s “Golden Dome” project, he has been in negotiations with more than 300 aerospace companies as the Space Force begins preliminary design work on this missile defense system.
President Trump’s Golden Dome czar says he has held “one-vs.-one” talks with more than 300 private companies in recent months to hash out the secretive architecture of the futuristic missile defense shield that the administration is determined to put into operation over the entire U.S. homeland by mid-2028.
In his first public remarks since being named to the position in June, Gen. Michael A. Guetlein, vice chief of space operations at the U.S. Space Force, told an audience at the annual Reagan National Defense Forum that although the layered design of the Golden Dome remains classified, he is confident that “our industry partners have a pretty good insight into what we’re doing.”
The project, which remains mostly cloaked in secrecy, received $24.5 billion in funding this year from Congress, with that number expected to rise considerably in later years.
My sense from Guetlein’s remarks is that right now the project is simply gathering already existing missile defense assets under one roof in order to get something operational by 2028 as ordered by Trump. Guetlein is also getting the enthusiastic support of the industry — which sees big bucks flowing their way from Golden Dome in the coming years. Many of the new space startups have been shifting operations from civilian space to this military project in anticipation of this funding.
While the concept is not unreasonable, considering the success seen with the Pentagon’s Patriot system and Israel’s Iron Dome, the secret structure so far of Golden Dome is almost guaranteed to lend itself to corruption and wasteful spending, a systemic problem within our present federal government.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The print edition can be purchased at Amazon or from any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
According to guarded remarks by the head of Trump’s “Golden Dome” project, he has been in negotiations with more than 300 aerospace companies as the Space Force begins preliminary design work on this missile defense system.
President Trump’s Golden Dome czar says he has held “one-vs.-one” talks with more than 300 private companies in recent months to hash out the secretive architecture of the futuristic missile defense shield that the administration is determined to put into operation over the entire U.S. homeland by mid-2028.
In his first public remarks since being named to the position in June, Gen. Michael A. Guetlein, vice chief of space operations at the U.S. Space Force, told an audience at the annual Reagan National Defense Forum that although the layered design of the Golden Dome remains classified, he is confident that “our industry partners have a pretty good insight into what we’re doing.”
The project, which remains mostly cloaked in secrecy, received $24.5 billion in funding this year from Congress, with that number expected to rise considerably in later years.
My sense from Guetlein’s remarks is that right now the project is simply gathering already existing missile defense assets under one roof in order to get something operational by 2028 as ordered by Trump. Guetlein is also getting the enthusiastic support of the industry — which sees big bucks flowing their way from Golden Dome in the coming years. Many of the new space startups have been shifting operations from civilian space to this military project in anticipation of this funding.
While the concept is not unreasonable, considering the success seen with the Pentagon’s Patriot system and Israel’s Iron Dome, the secret structure so far of Golden Dome is almost guaranteed to lend itself to corruption and wasteful spending, a systemic problem within our present federal government.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The print edition can be purchased at Amazon or from any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
The best methods of being granted large sums of money from government contracts, are the same as the ones previously used! Fooling the same people and paying off the same congressman with the guarantee of the same results. Everyone wins but the US taxpayer.
A system guaranteed to be obsolete before it’s even created. Designed to take down missiles traveling so fast, that even lasers do not have time to charge their capacitors before the object has already passed them by.
The recent drones over the East Coast have proven we don’t have a clue for a response… Not a single drone was shot down! And the Chinese Balloon with remote sensing mapping out our installations without a response until it was too late.
They’re talking life support and G forces in the age of robots were it’s no longer relevant. Or better yet, Poland using Calvary against Germany’s mechanized infantry.
If defense has proven impractical or even impossible, then a mutually assured destruction remains our best hope.
If no one wins, what’s the point? A Mars base can’t come quick enough.
Don’t make space capability pay the price for aviation’s bloat
You have to ask yourself what defense spending is for.
Does NGAD or F-35 have ANY capability to shoot down an ICBM or warheads.
The answer to that is “no.”
So why does America continue to fund aviation more than space?
LeMay and Rickover ate huge amounts of war budgets, leaving Ike to strangle ABMA in the crib.
And yet, of all the things Russia’s military bloat funded, R-7 made them lots of money in terms of satellite launch. Nikita used space as a way NOT to have to spend Rubles matching America bomber-for-bomber, blue-water-for-blue-water.
Space always pays the the price for someone else’s bloat–and I am fed up with it. It is the most easily strangled.
If I can hit a target from space, then I don’t need carriers and bases all over the planet. WWII/Cold War logistics is part of what is bankrupting America, not a handful of KKVs.
Max,
Brush up on your orbital mechanics. Kinetic interceptors based in space are already moving at orbital speed before launching from their carrier satellites – faster than ICBMs or SLBMs ever go. ICBMs and SLBMs have to start from a dead stop on the ground, and tear through a thick atmosphere on the way up until they reach space and, even then, they can’t reach orbital velocity or they’d never come back down on their targets. Space-based missile defenses will not be obsolete before deployment.
The mysterious East Coast drones were able to run around at will because the US has not had a continental perimeter defense against anything endo-atmospheric since before the end of the Cold War. And we have never had a defense against airborne threats launched from inside US borders. The early-Cold-War Century Series jet interceptors were mainly based along the West Coast, in Alaska and along the US-Canadian border. I grew up 50 miles from one of those bases. But all of the radar was pointing outward.
The Chinese balloon was, so the story goes, allowed to do its fairly harmless observations so the US could photograph it at high resolution, monitor its transmissions and figure out how it was communicating with its home base, then bring it down in water so as to preserve more of the payload for forensic examination.
That’s probably true, as far as it goes. But there’s also the fact that the US has little organized air defense over CONUS and the balloon would have no thermal signature to which a heat-seeking missile would be attracted and might well have had a fairly modest radar cross-section as well making radar-guided missiles iffy propositions too. I don’t really know how it was ultimately brought down and I don’t trust anything the government has claimed on that score. My own surmise is that it was brought down by gunfire, most probably, to hole the envelope, allowing a gradual descent which would pose the least risk to the payload as it would land fairly gently, in water, where ships could reach it quickly.
Brilliant Pebbles was a workable, almost global defense against even mass ICBM raids that was undone in the 1990s by brutal launch costs. The launch costs alone were forecast to run into the hundreds of billions of dollars, plus few had the imagination at the time to wrap their heads around the idea of placing thousands of satellites into LEO. It seemed incomprehensible.
Since that time, SpaceX has revolutionized both the cost of access to space, and the comprehension of what is a realistic number of objects placed into orbit over a 5-10 year period. Thousands are now completely realistic. It’s an idea whose time has finally come, and while Brilliant Pebbles or a similar amalgam are not a perfect defense against all nuclear threats, they are a highly credible and affordable defense against the primary civilization-threatening nuclear threats, mass ICBM and SLBM raids.
Agree with Mr. Eagleson, this country has left itself completely defenseless against all manner of threats, internal and external. Since the early 60s, continental air defense has been allowed to languish down to nothing, once McNamara decided mutually assured destruction was fiscally and politically expedient.