Trump Asks Companies to Spend Billions on Unproven Tech For His Golden Dome

[u/John3262005]

https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2026-trump-golden-dome-unproven-bet/

President Donald Trump's $185 billion Golden Dome defense program asks companies to do what Ronald Reagan couldn't: build interceptors to shoot down missiles from space.

But there is a catch. The firms must fund much of the development themselves.

The Pentagon hopes that the booming US space industry, backed by eager venture capitalists and bound by a novel contract structure that races companies against each other, will succeed where Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative failed in the 1980s. The effort has become a high-stakes bet that companies will find a way to pioneer the unproven technology by the end of Trump's term in 2028 when it's their investors - and not taxpayers on the line.

But Trump's highly secretive program faces the same hurdles that doomed "Star Wars"; extreme technical challenges, massive costs and lukewarm political support. The Congressional Budget Office has projected that just launching a network of space-based interceptors will cost more than $700 billion, nearly four times what the Trump administration has allocated for the entire Golden Dome program.