The world's leading space company has offered the Pentagon a "subscription" to the services of a large satellite constellation. It will become the largest constellation of spacecraft built for military purposes. However, the data on this comes from the Reuters news agency, which has repeatedly published fakes about Elon Musk's companies.
Reuters, citing six anonymous industry sources, said that SpaceX, Palantir (software developer) and Anduril (UAV manufacturer) were the favorites in the preliminary negotiations on the implementation of the Golden Dome project. The latter was recently announced by Donald Trump, who positioned it as a powerful missile defense system covering the territory of the United States.
The three companies have already held meetings with representatives of the White House and the Pentagon, having previously agreed on some figures for the project. The total number of rocket launch monitoring satellites for the Golden Dome will be from 400 to 1000, which will allow observing the entire globe. After the rocket launch is fixed, a separate fleet of 200 satellites equipped with "rockets or lasers" (as Reuters wrote) will have to hit enemy missiles.
In this scheme, SpaceX itself will not equip its satellites with weapons, 200 armed vehicles will be manufactured by some other suppliers. At the same time, the company's satellites will not be owned by the American state.: Elon Musk will provide subscription services, that is, with regular new payments. Such a scheme will allow them to be launched faster, since the Pentagon's bureaucracy in the field of space projects is excessive and makes the launch approval process too lengthy and inefficient.
Reuters reported that a number of its sources are concerned about the subscription model, as it allegedly does not give the military full control over these satellites. Recall that the news agency has long been known for gross misrepresentation of information in its publications concerning companies and the personality of Elon Musk. After it published an article about SpaceX's participation in the Golden Dome project, the entrepreneur wrote on his social network "This is not true."
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Despite the fact that Reuters texts on this topic did often deviate from the truth, it is not known exactly what the agency misinformed the public this time, since Musk did not specify. We are probably talking about some details, but the very fact of SpaceX's participation in the Golden Dome is beyond doubt. The United States simply does not have any other organization capable of mass launch of satellites or their production in a series of many hundreds of copies.
At the same time, the key component of the Golden Dome is precisely armed satellites. And here neither their technical appearance, nor even the choice of the main means of destruction is clear yet. In theory, lasers can intercept the classic ICBMs that the United States has. But they are ineffective against stratospheric missiles with nuclear warheads such as the Oreshnik, Sarmat and Avangard, Iskanders, Zircons, and the like.
The latter can be intercepted by missiles. However, given the high maneuverability capabilities of these missiles, this will require interceptor missiles with a very large energy budget. Consequently, their mass will also become high. In addition, Russia alone has many hundreds of ballistic missiles with nuclear warheads. It is unclear how well 200 satellites will be able to protect the United States from them.
One of the problems is that the interceptor satellite must be low-orbit, and it will take too long to react from a geostationary orbit of 36,000 kilometers. And low-orbit satellites inevitably rotate relative to the Earth, and only a small part of the 200 will be permanently deployed where intercepting other people's missiles will be most effective. All this makes the deployment of a workable (against a serious opponent) Golden Dome system almost incredible.
