President Donald Trump has chosen a conception for his anti -missile defense system in the golden dome and appointed a chief of the ambitious defense program of $ 175 billion. Here are details on Golden Dome, where the idea comes from and how it will work.
How will it work?
The objective is that Golden Dome operates a network of hundreds of satellites surrounding the world with sophisticated sensors and interceptors to eliminate incoming enemy missiles after having downs of countries like China, Iran, North Korea or Russia.
“I promised the American people to build an advanced anti -missile defense shield to protect our homeland against the threat of a foreign missile attack,” said Trump when he made the announcement on Tuesday.
In April, the Pentagon asked the defense entrepreneurs how they would conceive and build a network to eliminate intercontinental ballistic missiles during the “boost phase” just after takeoff – the slow and predictable rise of an enemy missile through the earth’s atmosphere. The existing defenses target enemy missiles while they travel in space.
Once the missile is detected, Golden Dome cuts it before it enters space with a interceptor or a laser, or further along its travel path in space with an existing anti -missile defense system which uses land interceptors stationed in California and Alaska.
Under the space interception layer, the system will have another defense layer based in the United States or around the United States. This is something that the Pentagon anti -missile defense agency examined during the first Trump administration.
Is the golden dome like the Iron Dome of Israel?
“We helped Israel with theirs, and [it] was very successful, and now we have a technology that is even well advanced to this, “said Trump, referring to the Iron Dome anti -missile defense system of Israel.
The short -term Iron dome air defense system has been built to intercept the types of rockets drawn by Hamas in Gaza.
Developed by Rafael Advanced Systems Israel Advanced with American support, it became operational in 2011. Each truck unit draws missiles guided by radar to explode short -range threats such as rockets, mortars and drones in the air.
The system determines if a rocket is underway to hit a populated area; Otherwise, the rocket is ignored and allowed to land without danger.
Iron Dome was initially presented as offering a coverage of the size of a city against rockets with ranges between 4 and 70 km (2.5 to 43 miles), but the experts say that this has since been extended.
How is it similar to the Star Wars initiative of the president of the time, Ronald Reagan?
“We will really end the work that President Reagan started 40 years ago, ending the threat of missiles for the American homeland,” Trump said on Tuesday.
The idea of cutting rocket launchers or lasers to satellites so that they can shoot down the enemy intercontinental ballistic missiles is not new. It was part of the Star Wars initiative designed during the presidency of Ronald Reagan. But this represents a huge and expensive technological leap in current capacities.
Reagan’s strategic defense initiative, as it was called, was announced in 1983 as revolutionary research on a national defense system which could make nuclear weapons obsolete.
The heart of the SDI program was a plan for developing a space anti-missile defense program that could protect the United States from a large-scale nuclear attack.
The proposal involved many layers of technology that would allow the United States to automatically identify and destroy a large number of incoming ballistic missiles as they were launched, as they stole and as their targets approached.
SDI failed because it was too expensive, too ambitious from the point of view of technology, could not be easily tested and seemed to violate an existing anti-organization missile treaty.
Who will build golden dome?
Trump Ally Elon Musk’s satellite rocket and satellite company, SpaceX, have become a favorite alongside the Palantir software company and Andundil drone manufacturer to build key system components.
Many early systems should come from existing production lines. Participants in the White House press conference with Trump named L3harris Technologies, Lockheed Martin and RTX Corp as potential entrepreneurs for the massive project.
L3 has invested $ 150 million in the construction of its new installations in Fort Wayne, Indiana, where it makes satellites of hypersonic and ballistic follow -up sensors which are part of an effort of the Pentagon to better detect and follow hypersonic weapons with space sensors and could be adapted to the golden dome.
But the financing of Golden Dome remains uncertain. Republican legislators have proposed an initial investment of 25 billion dollars for it in the context of a wider $ 150 billion defense set, but this funding is linked to a controversial reconciliation bill which faces significant obstacles to the congress.
