In May, more than 100 employees of Varda Space Industries gathered at the aerospace start-up’s Southern California headquarters to watch a real-time feed of a capsule hurtling toward Earth at more than 18,000 miles per hour.
Every few minutes, a voice crackled through the speakers with coordinates from Varda’s partners in Australia, where the capsule was projected to fall. The updates were met with cheers, as Varda’s calculations of the journey proved right. The capsule landed “on target,” or where the company had predicted.
The exercise was intended to show that Varda and its partners could successfully track a hypersonic missile, rocket or drone and calculate its trajectory from space within minutes, so that the object could theoretically be intercepted. The technologies to pinpoint such fast-moving objects are highly coveted, and no military currently has them, defense officials said.
“The benchmark for success is daunting,” said Will Bruey, the chief executive of Varda, which worked on the test with the artificial intelligence weapons company Anduril and the aerospace company LeoLabs. “Pulling this off requires not just technical precision to move the vehicle in orbit, but also tracking it and reporting it.”
Many tech companies and defense tech start-ups have recently conducted similar drills to show off their technological prowess as they aim for the same goal: getting a piece of President Trump’s “Golden Dome” project, a hypothetical defense system that can intercept rockets and missiles.
Mr. Trump promised during his campaign last year to build a U.S. system similar to Israel’s Iron Dome, which protects the country against missile attacks. In January, Mr. Trump signed an executive order to create the defense shield. He has said Golden Dome will cost $175 billion, with tens of billions more likely to be spent, making it one of the most ambitious military projects of his administration.
“We will have the best system ever built,” he said in an Oval Office address discussing the defense shield in May.
Defense experts have said Mr. Trump’s plan could cost more than $1 trillion, adding that it is unclear if even the most advanced technology could create an impenetrable barrier around the United States.
But tech companies are not waiting. Many have flocked to defense conferences and conducted exercises to display everything from sonars that monitor incoming threats to lasers that shoot missiles from space. Companies chosen for Golden Dome are likely to become the new cornerstones of U.S. defense, military officials involved in the project said.
Larger tech firms including Palantir, which builds advanced data processing systems, and Anduril, which makes A.I.-backed weapons systems, have already been in discussions to get involved, two military officials briefed on the conversations said. Smaller defense tech companies such as Epirus, Ursa Major and Armada have also been in discussions with the government, they said.
“There are more than 100 companies out there with a sensor, satellite or other devices they want to sell to Golden Dome,” said Mark Montgomery, a retired rear admiral and the senior director of the Center for Cyber and Technology Innovation at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a Washington think tank. “This is the Wild West, and this is a massive opportunity for whoever is selected.”
The White House and Department of Defense declined to comment on Golden Dome. Anduril also declined to comment, and Palantir did not respond to a request for comment.
The idea of a Golden Dome is not new. In the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan tried building a missile defense system known as “Star Wars.” The project failed.
“Ronald Reagan wanted it many years ago, but they didn’t have the technology,” Mr. Trump said in May. “But it’s something we’re going to have. We’re going to have it at the highest level.”
In that May meeting, Mr. Trump gave the project the name Golden Dome and announced that Gen. Michael Guetlein, the vice chief at the Space Force, would lead its development. Mr. Trump has set an ambitious timeline, saying he wants to “have it done in three years.”
Golden Dome is set to be far more expansive than Israel’s Iron Dome. While Iron Dome covers an area roughly the size of New Jersey, Golden Dome is aimed at handling a broader range of threats — including ballistic missiles that fly into space before speeding back toward Earth — for the entire continental United States.
Golden Dome is also likely to have multiple layers, including one to defend on land and another for space, defense officials and military experts who have consulted on the shield said. Some details of the program were previously reported by Reuters.
Longtime defense contractors, including Lockheed Martin, Boeing and RTX (formerly known as Raytheon), are expected to be involved in the land-based system and other parts of the project, two defense officials said. Defense tech start-ups will come into play for space-based interceptions, which are highly experimental, they said.
“The space-based interceptor is by far the most technically complex element,” said Charles Beames, a retired colonel and former director of space systems at the Pentagon who is chairman of York Space Systems, a defense tech company. Golden Dome needs the “strengths of traditional space and defense companies with the innovation of today’s leading defense technology firms,” he said.
Intercepting a missile from space requires systems that can reliably track an object moving at hypersonic speeds and predict its trajectory, as well as decide when and how to intercept that object and which objects to intercept, two defense officials said.
Palantir has discussed building an A.I.-backed platform to analyze threats and control the different systems needed to follow a missile’s trajectory, while Anduril has discussed using experimental interceptors such as lasers to take down missiles, they said. SpaceX, Elon Musk’s rocket company, is likely to help build infrastructure and get satellites into orbit, they added.
SpaceX did not respond to a request for comment.
Start-ups including Varda have also jumped in. The company was founded in January 2021 to design and fly spacecraft for making pharmaceuticals in space. The company launches into orbit reusable capsules, which take advantage of microgravity to create specialized molecules that are hard to produce on Earth. Varda has raised more than $329 million from venture capital firms including Founders Fund and Khosla Ventures.
After Mr. Trump signed his executive order for a missile shield in January, Mr. Bruey saw an opportunity, he said, to use Varda’s technology to “support national security needs.”
He met with executives at Anduril and LeoLabs, with whom he is friendly, and broached the idea of working together. Their combined technologies could track an object moving at hypersonic speeds to Earth, the way a missile would potentially move, he said.
The companies came together in May for the test. Varda provided the capsule, which was launched into orbit through a partnership with SpaceX. Varda’s engineers coordinated with LeoLabs and Anduril to track the capsule’s re-entry, predicting the path it would take and using LeoLab’s technology to document the journey in real time.
“We wanted to lean in and demonstrate how existing technology could be applied to new missions,” said Tony Frazier, the chief executive of LeoLabs.
At Varda’s headquarters during the test, employees watched screens in a NASA-like control room that tracked the capsule. The capsule, which had already been in orbit for a few weeks, began its descent to Earth at 6:37 p.m. Just after 6:55 p.m., applause broke out as the capsule’s parachute deployed.
Twelve minutes later, the capsule was confirmed to have landed in a remote part of Australia. The demonstration was declared a success.
“No one is going to forget this day ever,” Mr. Bruey said. “We’ve already started planning the next demonstration of what we can do.”
Sheera Frenkel is a reporter based in the San Francisco Bay Area, covering the ways technology impacts everyday lives with a focus on social media companies, including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, YouTube, Telegram and WhatsApp.
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