Trump Dome

"Ronald Reagan dreamed of this many years ago," Donald Trump declared. "But the necessary technologies didn’t exist back then." According to him, America now has the chance to build a "cutting-edge missile defense shield." The project, dubbed Golden Dome—a nod to Israel’s Iron Dome—is designed to protect the United States from missile attacks using hundreds, or even thousands, of satellites capable of tracking and intercepting enemy missiles during their launch phase.

Promises to create such a shield had already surfaced during the election campaign. On May 20, Trump announced that his "big, beautiful" tax bill (not yet approved by Congress) includes initial funding of $25 billion. The total cost of the project, he estimated, would be $175 billion.

In reality, the program is likely to cost significantly more. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projects that total expenditures could exceed $500 billion over 20 years. The proposed timeline is also highly optimistic: Trump promises to complete the project within "two and a half to three years," though experts point out that it would require years of development and testing.

Equally questionable is Trump’s promise that the system would provide "nearly 100 percent protection." The effectiveness of the Golden Dome depends directly on the scale of its deployment—and the math is not in favor of its ambitions.

A recent report by the American Physical Society, which includes leading applied physics experts, found that intercepting even a single salvo of ten North Korean Hwasong-18 ballistic missiles would require around 16,000 orbital interceptors. If U.S. command wants even 30 seconds of decision time before launching a counterstrike, that number rises to 36,000.

And that’s without accounting for the challenge of defending territories such as Alaska or the U.S. Upper Midwest. As the authors of the report emphasize, this would require "far more" satellites than even the most ambitious projections currently envision.

In part, the Golden Dome initiative is a response to growing Pentagon concerns over the rapid expansion of missile arsenals among potential U.S. adversaries—both in sheer numbers and in technological diversity. Traditionally, American missile defense and radar systems have been oriented toward trajectories over the North Pole. But the emergence of highly maneuverable hypersonic missiles and so-called "fractional orbital bombardment systems," capable of partially circling the globe, makes the paths of incoming threats far less predictable.

A recent report from the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) illustrates this shift: its diagram shows missiles striking U.S. territory from virtually every direction. Against this backdrop, Canada—a key U.S. partner in the joint aerospace command NORAD—is reportedly in talks to participate in the Golden Dome project.

The Golden Dome project also underscores the growing role of near-Earth orbit as the next frontier in geopolitical rivalry among the U.S., China, and Russia. One telling indicator is the satellite Kosmos-2553, which, according to U.S. military assessments, is an unarmed prototype of one of the most troubling categories of orbital weapons: a nuclear device capable of disabling hundreds of low-Earth orbit satellites—the very satellites the Golden Dome would depend on.

China, for its part, is rapidly advancing its own anti-satellite capabilities. "They’re moving at a breathtaking pace," said General Stephen Whiting, head of U.S. Space Command, commenting on the speed of China’s military expansion in space.

The risks posed by anti-satellite weapons go far beyond military infrastructure. At stake is the entire satellite architecture that underpins communication, navigation, precise timing, and geolocation—without which the modern economy simply cannot function. The vulnerability of global navigation systems has become especially apparent amid a sharp rise in incidents of jamming and signal spoofing.

Russia and China have already deployed satellites with "advanced maneuvering capabilities" capable of interfering with or disabling U.S. spacecraft. In May 2024, the Russian satellite Kosmos-2576 entered a "coplanar" orbit with the American reconnaissance satellite USA 314—an act that, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, could indicate a test of orbital weapons.

France is so alarmed by such incidents that it is reportedly considering the development of "satellite bodyguards"—systems designed to detect threats and defend themselves using robotic arms or even lasers.

But space conflict is already evolving beyond direct interceptions. In one incident last year, the Chinese satellite TJS-4—believed to be linked to electronic intelligence—positioned itself between a U.S. surveillance satellite and the Sun, casting a shadow that would have interfered with image capture. According to CSIS, this may represent a so-called "shadowing maneuver," a tactic used to obscure a satellite’s technical characteristics from observation.

The U.S., however, is not staying passive. Last month, the American satellite USA 324, under the command of General Whiting, maneuvered near the Chinese reconnaissance satellites TJS-16 and TJS-17—with the distance between them narrowing to just 12–17 kilometers at certain points, according to COMSPOC, a firm that tracks space objects.

Such "close shadowing," as noted by astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center, is precisely the kind of behavior that draws outrage from the Pentagon when conducted by China.