Announcing his ambitious ‘Golden Dome’ project in May this year, US President Donald Trump vowed that the missile-defense shield would be “fully operational” by the end of his term and would protect the US from all kinds of aerial threats – from ballistic missiles to hypersonic cruise missiles.
Trump also said that the whole program will cost an estimated US$175 billion.
Envisioned as a “system of systems,” the Golden Dome project is expected to integrate the US’s existing ground-based interceptors with planned thousands of space-based interceptors to provide the US homeland with a layered missile defense shield.
“This design for the Golden Dome will integrate with our existing defense capabilities and should be fully operational before the end of my term, so we’ll have it done in about three years,” Trump said during a press conference in the Oval Office.
“Once fully constructed, the Golden Dome will be capable of intercepting missiles even if they are launched from the other sides of the world, and even if they are launched from space.”
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Following that announcement, the US lawmakers allocated nearly US$25 billion for the Golden Dome in Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act this summer.
While no hardware has been deployed and the program remains in its conceptual phase, Congress has begun allocating funds for research, studies, and classified development tracks.
Last month, the Space Force awarded initial prototype contracts to multiple firms to develop space-based interceptors capable of taking down missile threats within minutes of launch.
Earlier this month, the Missile Defense Agency (MDA), part of the US Department of Defense, announced that it had selected more than 1,000 companies, including Viasat, Rocket Lab, and Deloitte, to move forward with proposals that could support Golden Dome.
However, more than six months after that momentous announcement in May in the Oval Office, there is little clarity on how much the project will cost, with figures ranging anywhere from USD175 billion to as high as trillions of dollars, and little hope that the system will be operational before the end of President Trump’s second term in 2029.
How Much Will The ‘Golden Dome’ Cost?
Though Trump cited USD 175 billion during his Oval Office announcement in May, there is still no consensus on the project’s actual cost.
The final cost will depend on many variables, including the area of geographic coverage, whether it covers only high-value targets within the US, the whole continental US, including Canada, or whether the overseas US territories and military bases are also covered.
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Furthermore, the cost will depend on the types and numbers of threats it must address, and on the degree of resilience it is expected to achieve.
If Trump is to be believed, he expects the system to provide 100% foolproof security against all aerial threats.
However, most defense experts are unanimous that the figure of USD 175 billion is a gross underestimation of the real cost, that the timeline to operationalize the system by 2028 is unrealistic, and that the idea of 100% foolproof security is a mirage and not technically feasible.
According to the Arms Control Centre, by the end of 2028, only a demonstration under ideal conditions is expected and not the full-scale operationalization of the system.
According to Todd Harrison, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and author of a 51-page report, Build Your Own Golden Dome: A Framework for Understanding Costs, Choices, and Tradeoffs, “As long as requirements remain undefined, Golden Dome can cost as much or as little as policymakers are willing to spend.”
Harrison built cost models for individual components and combined them in different ways to create six example architectures.
According to his analysis, if the system prioritizes the president’s schedule and cost constraints, with capability being a secondary priority, generally focusing on deploying items that are already in production or development, and includes a limited deployment of boost-phase space-based interceptors, the cost remains within the US$175 billion funding limit for the first five years, but could cost US$471 billion over 20 years.
Harrison concludes that Trump’s cited US$175 billion figure would buy only a limited system, perhaps sufficient against the arsenal of North Korea, but inadequate against the scale of China’s and Russia’s arsenals.
At the other end of the spectrum, if the system prioritizes defending against strategic threats to the homeland, specifically long-range ballistic missiles, fractional orbital bombardment systems, and hypersonic weapons, it has to rely primarily on space-based interceptors capable of engaging long-range ballistic and hypersonic threats in multiple phases of flight.
The resulting architecture provides global coverage but at a high cost: roughly US$2.4 trillion over 20 years, with 96 percent of the funding going to the Space Force.
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However, according to Harrison, if the US prioritizes Robust All-Threat Defense and aligns with Trump’s goal of “very close to 100 percent” effectiveness against the full spectrum of aerial threats, the system could cost as much as USD 3.2 trillion over the next 20 years.
Similarly, a May report by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) concluded that recent declines in the cost of launch service for space-based interceptors (SBI) could reduce the cost of deploying a constellation of SBIs to defeat intercontinental ballistic missiles fired at the United States, from US$264 billion to US$161 billion (at the lower end), and from US$831 billion to US$542 billion (at the higher end).
It must be noted that the CBO study was conducted keeping in mind the threat posed by North Korean ICBMs.
However, the executive order by the President, titled The Iron Dome for America, calls for deploying a missile defense system to protect the United States not only from attacks by regional adversaries (ones with limited capabilities, such as North Korea) but also from attacks by peer or near-peer adversaries (ones with military capabilities similar to those of the US, such as China and Russia).
Such a defense, the CBO report acknowledges, could require a more expansive SBI capability than the systems examined in the previous studies, and could cost substantially more.
Meanwhile, a recent Bloomberg study concluded that the Golden Dome system, which effectively protects the US from an all-out aerial attack, would cost around US$1.1 trillion, more than 500% higher than Trump’s estimate of US$175 billion.
Both the Bloomberg study and the report by Todd Harrison agree that the space-based layer of defense, specifically outlined as a requirement of Golden Dome in the executive order, is the most technologically complex and likely the most expensive element of the project.
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However, more worryingly, apart from the cost element, the technology for a constellation of space-based interceptors (SBIs) doesn’t yet exist.
The US will have to design, manufacture, test, and deploy thousands of SBIs in low-Earth orbit, tasks that would require many billions of dollars and would be difficult to complete in just a few years.
In fact, if costs inflate many times over and the SBIs’ test results are not satisfactory, there is every possibility that a future administration could review the program entirely or at least partially.
“I think that a future administration, a future Congress, would have a hard time looking at all the expenses and the totality of the things that have been thrown out there and saying, ‘This is a good idea,'” said Dave Vorland, who served as the acting deputy assistant secretary of space and missile defense policy in the Biden administration.
If that happens, it would not be the first time an ambitious space-based missile defense program has been axed due to cost escalation or technical infeasibility.
It may be noted that the idea of shooting down enemy intercontinental ballistic missiles from space as they lift off is not new. The late President Ronald Reagan talked of it way back in 1983. It was then termed the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), better known as “Star Wars.”
That program faced significant technological challenges and met a silent death.
So, will Trump achieve what Reagan did not or could not? Only time will tell.
However, it is highly unlikely that the Golden Dome will be fully operational within Trump’s second term, without requiring significant additional funding.
- Sumit Ahlawat has over a decade of experience in news media. He has worked with Press Trust of India, Times Now, Zee News, Economic Times, and Microsoft News. He holds a Master’s Degree in International Media and Modern History from the University of Sheffield, UK.
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