The administration of United States President Donald Trump has circulated plans for its $175bn “Golden Dome” missile defence system, revealing a possible new missile field in the Midwest and details of the project’s plans to shoot down missiles in space, the Reuters news agency reports.
According to a series of slides, titled “Go Fast, Think Big!”, presented to some 3,000 defence contractors in Huntsville, Alabama, last week, Reuters says that plans for the Golden Dome include three layers of missile interceptors, radar arrays and lasers, in addition to its space-based defences.
While the presentation highlighted that the US “has built both interceptors and re-entry vehicles” for space-based missile interception before, the plans also acknowledged that the US has never built a vehicle that can handle the heat of reentry while targeting an enemy missile, according to Reuters.
Trump has estimated his Golden Dome could cost $175bn.
So far, Congress has appropriated $25bn for the system in the president’s tax and spending bill passed in July. Another $45.3bn is earmarked for the Golden Dome in Trump’s 2026 presidential budget request.
“They have a lot of money, but they don’t have a target of what it costs yet,” a US official cited by Reuters said.
Plans for the dome included a map showing that a new large-scale missile field, with systems built by Lockheed Martin, could be located in the US Midwest, Reuters reported.
The site would be in addition to two similar missile fields that already exist in southern California and Alaska.
Lockheed Martin has described the Gold Dome as “a defence system that shields America from aerial threats, hypersonic missiles and drone swarms with unmatched speed and accuracy”.
“Thanks to President Trump’s vision, Golden Dome will make this a reality, securing our future,” Lockheed Martin wrote in a post on social media in March.
Reuters said the slides did not include any references to Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which was part of a bid for Golden Dome contracts, alongside the software maker Palantir and defence systems manufacturer Anduril.
Trump campaigned on building “a missile defence shield around our country,” in the lead-up to the 2024 presidential election. At an earlier campaign event in July 2024, Trump compared his plans with Israel’s Iron Dome.
The Iron Dome is Israel’s missile defence system, which detects an incoming rocket, determines its path and intercepts it. The system was developed with more than $1bn in funding from the US.
Days after taking office on January 27, Trump signed an executive order to “immediately begin the construction of a state-of-the-art Iron Dome missile defence shield, which will be able to protect Americans”.
Although Trump secured $25bn for the system in his tax and spending bill, which also included significant cuts to federal funding for other programmes, including Medicaid, the project still faces a significant funding shortfall.
Trump suggested in May that the shortfall could be partly made up by Canada paying $61bn towards the project.
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