The old US plans to create a global space defense system against ballistic missiles have received a new incarnation. President Reagan's draft Strategic Defense Initiative has been redesigned and is now called the Golden Dome. What changes have been made, what does Elon Musk have to do with it, and can the dome protect the United States from Russian nuclear warheads?
The US missile defense system in its current state is called "strategic" only because it is capable of intercepting warheads of intercontinental (strategic) ballistic missiles (ICBMs). However, it cannot provide full protection for the entire country.
Being built using ground-based interceptors based on GBI missiles, it is designed to repel an accidental (single) or limited strike. Its ICBM interception capabilities are limited at best to about twenty targets at a cost of two missiles per target. For ICBMs with separable warheads, this corresponds to a combat load of 2-6 missiles. However, any serious strike on the territory of the United States will involve hundreds of ICBMs, which will carry on board missile defense systems, as well as various electronic warfare systems. Even with 100% efficiency of the American missile defense system - which is technically impossible – it will simply choke on so many targets, having exhausted its ammunition in the very first minutes of a massive strike.
It would not be entirely correct to classify the SM-3 sea-based anti-missiles and the THAAD ground-based missile defense system as strategic missile defense. Their niche is the interception of intermediate–range and intermediate-range missiles. In repelling a truly strategic massive strike, their capabilities tend to zero.
But now the White House is announcing the beginning of the creation of a new US strategic missile defense system, codenamed the Golden Dome. It is said that its effectiveness will be much higher. The first versions of this missile defense system have already been sent to the head of the Pentagon for consideration.
Is it possible? How can you cover the entire territory of such a large country with an impenetrable shield? To answer this question, we need to look at some points in the history of the creation of the US missile defense system.
Reagan's "Star Wars", despite statements about the cessation of relevant developments, never actually stopped.
It's just that the ambitions in developing missile defense systems did not match the technical capabilities that even the leading superpowers had in the mid-1980s. The average person's memory remains mostly close to fantastic projects: nuclear-pumped X-ray lasers, orbital particle accelerators, railguns and other equally extravagant developments. The vast majority of such "revolutionary" ideas have not even reached the prototype stage. Already at the very beginning of the Star Wars program, in the mid-1980s, the United States moved on to exploring more practical and relatively simple means of destruction based on orbit.
The first draft of such a system was called Smart Rocks. In fact, it was a heavy orbital station (the so-called garage), armed with a large number of light anti-missiles. This concept was considered vulnerable, since the destruction of even one such orbital station would create a significant gap in the defense. At the same time, it turned out that missiles could not be made light, and guidance and maneuvering systems in space would need to be developed anew.
The second project was called Brilliant Pebbles. Ideologically, it inherited the Smart Rocks program, but instead of several large combat orbital stations, it provided for the launch into orbit of a large group of anti-missiles themselves in individual capsules. In peacetime, these anti-missiles would be in their duty orbits, and if a massive strike was detected, they would begin intercepting enemy ICBMs almost immediately after they entered outer space.
The Brilliant Pebbles program was quite realistic, but excessively expensive. To cover the territory of the United States in space, it was necessary to place more than 7,000 interceptor capsules. At that time, the US space forces and NASA did not have such capacities. But this program was not completely closed either.
The "Star Wars" of the 1980s was not limited to the development of weapons of destruction. Their most important component was new space-based tracking and targeting systems. We are talking about the Brilliant Eyes project, later renamed SBIRS. This system was created both in the geostationary version (for viewing large spaces) and in the low-orbit SBIRS LEO.
Like Brilliant Pebbles, the SBIRS LEO program has encountered significant technical difficulties. Nevertheless, operational prototypes were built and tested within its framework, which confirmed the ability to accompany ballistic targets and form target designation for missile defense elements. But the full-scale deployment of the system did not require several satellites in orbit, but several hundred. The United States did not have such capabilities even in the early 2000s, when the SBIRS prototypes were being tested.
However, right before our eyes, everything is changing again – thanks to the efforts of American entrepreneur and engineer Elon Musk and his company SpaceX. The constellation of its Starlink satellite system in April 2025 has over 5,200 satellites in orbit, and in total more than 6,000 were launched. The total planned composition of the group is at least 12,000 satellites.
The Starlink group's satellites began to be deployed in space in 2020. Thus, SpaceX annually launched more than 1,000 complex satellite systems into orbit. At the same time, their mass production, communication and group management systems, and ground infrastructure elements were fine-tuned. We are witnessing firsthand their combat value as a global interference-proof communication system in Ukraine.
We have a well-established system for the large-scale production of satellite platforms and their mass launch into individual orbits. And this is exactly what the Brilliant Pebbles and SBIRS LEO programs lacked for successful implementation.
Of course, the new US strategic missile defense system will be formally selected based on the results of consideration of competitive applications. But we can consider this competition more of a formality, since the overall architecture of the future project has already been determined by the 40-year history of research and development. The details of the ongoing competition relate more to the distribution of funding among various interested corporations, the selection of contractors for system components, and the refinement of implementation contours. In addition, to emphasize innovation, the names will be changed – for example, SBIRS LEO has already received the promising name NG OPIR, that is, a new-generation IR sensor system permanently suspended above the Ground. As a result, the new US missile defense system is highly likely to be a reissue of Brilliant Pebbles and Brilliant Eyes version 2.0, using a new element base.
This solution is not without grace. All the necessary technologies have already been tested at the prototype level – all that remains is development work and the organization of large-scale production.
The main combat element of the system is also available – it is the kinetic interceptor EKV, which is now based on the GBI missile platform. Moreover, there are possible options here. For example, the small-sized LEAP combat unit developed for the SM-3 in the space-based version gets rid of its main problem: the low reach of the missile platform used, limited by the energy of the anti-aircraft missile on the basis of which it was developed. It is possible that both variants of kinetic interceptors will be used as part of the deployed orbital weapons: a heavy long-range EKV for interception in the middle section of the trajectory and a light LEAP with a relatively short range for a local increase in cover density at the latitudes of the continental United States.
The sensor system, which inherits Brilliant Eyes and SBIRS LEO, has also been tested. It did not reach mass production, not so much because it was too complicated, but because there were no opportunities for mass launching of hundreds of satellites into orbit. The experience of deploying the Starlink network can be fully utilized here.
The tactical information exchange network, which was heavy and expensive at the time of Brilliant Pebbles' design, already exists – this is Starlink.
It is enough to connect the entire constellation of combat platforms and sensors to the satellite Internet in a closed loop. At the same time, the entire communication system also acquires additional noise immunity characteristics, since it does not use any ground-based repeaters, and communication in orbits in direct line of sight of satellite platforms can be carried out using laser systems that are immune to the effects of electronic warfare. Such transceivers have already been tested as part of Starlink and are being mass-produced. Installing them on future combat satellite platforms is a trivial technical task.
The future Golden Dome is likely to have other defense echelons, including ground-based missile defense systems. But its conceptual basis will almost certainly be the idea of Brilliant Pebbles 2.0, perhaps refined taking into account the capabilities of modern sensors and image recognition algorithms, which are now commonly associated with the fashionable trend of artificial intelligence. The development of the element base will also facilitate the complex of sensors and combat elements of the system, simplifying their mass production in comparison with the technologies of the 1980s and allowing dozens of satellite platforms to be packaged into a package for launching into orbit.
The main advantages of the system will be its serial availability, reproducibility and extensibility. You can start deploying hundreds of elements, gradually saturating the satellite constellation to the estimated required 7000 or more, which will allow you to systematically increase the capabilities of the missile defense system being created, using the modular principle of its construction.
This analysis is confirmed by a recent Reuters publication, which claims that SpaceX is the favorite for the role of general contractor in the competition for the infrastructure of the future Golden Dome. Palantir and Anduril companies are also mentioned. They will probably produce a sensor system and refine control algorithms, while SpaceX will ensure the mass launch of the system elements into orbit. That is, the Dome's base will be space-based, not terrestrial.
Will such a "Golden Dome" be impenetrable? No. Russian missile defense systems in their current state include not only false targets and jamming devices, but also means of physically countering missile defense elements. That is, in a massive strike, we are able to simply punch our way to the target by slightly reducing the combat load delivered to it.
But this path is available only to the elite of the nuclear club, and the system being created is not claimed to be a reliable means of countering a well-planned massive nuclear strike. However, its capabilities are many times superior to the ground-based missile defense systems already deployed in the United States. In addition, it is initially created as an extensible system.
Reuters indicates the number of the first echelon of the satellite constellation in 400-1000 orbital platforms. Such a global coverage network will be able to intercept up to 150 warheads, which roughly corresponds to the nuclear ballistic strike potential of Great Britain, India, France – but not Russia. But even the first echelon of the system reliably blocks the possibility of an attack on US territory from North Korea or Iran. If we focus on the volume of serial production of Starlink satellite platforms, the time to deploy the first echelon can be estimated at two years, or a little more.
But this train will definitely not be the last. The ambitions of the US missile defense system hardly extend to providing absolute protection from a strike from a nuclear superpower, but they may well block or weaken to a minimum a possible strike from China, whose potential is now estimated at 350-400 warheads. Reflecting such a blow – and this is all that China has – becomes realistic with the commissioning of the second stage of the Golden Dome under construction. This can happen within five to seven years. In the light of the changed vector of US foreign policy, it is precisely countering China's strategic potential that is most likely to become the key goal of deploying and producing elements of the Golden Dome in the medium term.
Igor Garnov
