United States President Donald Trump picked a design for the Golden Dome for America missile defense system and named a leader of the $175 billion defense program.
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.
In April 2025, the U.S. Department of War asked military contractors to design and build a network to disrupt intercontinental ballistic missiles during the “boost phase” just after liftoff — the slow and predictable climb of an enemy missile through Earth’s atmosphere. Existing defenses target enemy missiles while they travel through space.
Once the missile has been detected, the Golden Dome will either shoot it down with an interceptor or a laser before it enters space, 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.
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 in the early 1980s by U.S. President Ronald Reagan, but it represents a huge and expensive technological leap from current capabilities.
President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), 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 U.S. to identify and automatically destroy a large number of incoming ballistic missiles as they were launched, as they flew, and as they approached their targets.