The Golden Dome missile defense system will cost about $175 billion and be operational “in less than three years” with “a success rate close to 100%,” President Donald Trump declared Tuesday afternoon as he shared new details about his ambitious, very expensive, and controversial missile defense shield for the U.S. homeland. It follows one of the president’s first official acts of his second term, ordering the U.S. military to move forward with plans for a massively enlarged architecture for defeating high-end missile threats.
“Once fully constructed, the Golden Dome will be capable of intercepting missiles even if they are launched from other sides of the world, and even if they are launched from space, and we will have the best system ever built,” Trump stated. His price tag stands in stark contrast to projections of more than half a trillion dollars and raises concerns about the weaponization of space and nuclear proliferation, which you can read more about later in this piece.
The system will be designed to “protect the homeland” from “cruise missiles, ballistic missiles, hypersonic missiles, drones, whether they’re conventional or nuclear,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth explained during the White House briefing.
The first tranche of funding, $25 billion, will be contained in the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” a wide-ranging bill to enact his taxation and immigration priorities, Trump noted.
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There were scant details during the briefing about how Golden Dome will actually work.
“We’re the only ones that have this – we call it super technology,” Trump posited. “Golden Dome will integrate with our existing defense capabilities and should be fully operational before the end of my term.”
In our earlier reporting about Golden Dome, we pointed out that this effort will take place in orbital space, at least in part, with the goal of shooting down incoming threats before they reach the homeland, and preferably while still in the boost phase not far from their launch point.
“It’s not just that we want space-based interceptors, we want them in [the] boost phase,” Chief of Space Operations Gen. Chance Saltzman said in March during an interview broadcast online as part of Defense One‘s State of Defense 2025: Air Force and Space Force virtual conference.
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Golden Dome is not the U.S. military’s first effort to develop and field space-based anti-missile capabilities. However, multiple previous attempts have been abandoned due to technical complexities and high costs. Space-based weapons were a particularly key element of the Reagan-era Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), infamously dubbed “Star Wars” by its critics, and which never came close to achieving its ambitious goals.
An artist’s conception of a space-based particle beam missile defense system from the Star Wars era., Los Alamos National Laboratory via Aerospace Projects Review
Saltzman in March acknowledged those challenges, but also made clear that he felt they were surmountable.
“I think there’s a lot of technical challenges,” he said. “I am so impressed by the innovative spirit of the American space industry. I’m pretty convinced that we will be able to technically solve those challenges.”
Saltzman recently suggested that Golden Dome could cost in excess of half a trillion dollars.
“I’m 34 years in this business; I’ve never seen an early estimate that was too high,” Saltzman replied. “My gut tells me there’s going to be some additional funding that’s necessary.”
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The price to develop, procure, and field Golden Dome will be just one part of the larger financial picture. Once deployed, the system will need to be maintained, staffed, and constantly evolved as technology moves forward along with the threats it is meant to confront. This is coming at a time when there are competing priorities that the U.S. military does not have the money to pay for, even though they are considered critical, without sacrificing other important programs. Nuclear modernization is among the largest costs the services are struggling to pay for today. So even with an injection of cash to jump-start Golden Dome — which should come in the form of a whopping $25 billion in the 2026 Fiscal Year — and pay for other competing programs, sustaining that funding over many years after a transient ‘sugar high’ is questionable, especially in an era of soaring deficits.
