Pete Hegseth reviews plans for space-based 'Golden Dome' US defense system

President Donald Trump's plans for the space-based "Golden Dome" missile defense system to defend the United States has been sent to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's desk for review. Trump has previously spoken about making a missile defense system similar to Israel's "Iron Dome" in order to defend the country.

The system, which would be based in space, was put into motion by Trump during his first week in office. If the project is carried out, it would be the first space-based weapons system to have the ability to destroy missiles launched from ground-based operations, per ABC News.

Trump signed an executive order in January for a potential system to be drawn up, and gave the military 60 days to provide recommendations for the defense system. Trump said in the executive order, "The United States will provide for the common defense of its citizens and the Nation by deploying and maintaining a next-generation missile defense shield."

The defense system is planned to defend the country "against ballistic, hypersonic, advanced cruise missiles, and other next-generation aerial attacks from peer, near-peer, and rogue adversaries" and will be made up of "space-based interceptors capable of boost-phase intercept."

General Stephen Whiting, the head of US Space Command, said in a speech at an event earlier this week in Colorado, “It’s time that we can clearly say that we need space fires, and we need weapons systems. We need orbital interceptors. We call these weapons, and we need them to deter a space conflict and to be successful if we end up in such a fight."

There have been multiple options that have been looked at and developed in order to fit the order from the White House, but Space Command has not talked about the specifics of the plan and what the defense system

The USA perfected MARV warheads in the 1980s this means the tech for mach 20 reentry and 100+G maneuvering was proven tech even back then. You don’t need to deorbit you put a hypersonic lifting body heatshield around the nose of a Pebble SDI use the delta V to push its vector to an intercept point of the upper atmosphere you flip your HGV upside down so the loft vector is towards earth this allows you to pull Gs earth wards pulling the HGV deep and steeper into the atmosphere it will.rapidly shed orbital velocity down to mach 15 or so then you can really start to pull G deep into the troposphere even down to ground level no hypersonic missile cruising at 100,000 feet would be safe from such a HGV shrieking down on it at mach 15+ from above. Down to seaskimmers you would still be close to mach 10 just like the original MARV concept used for ground attack. How much retained velocity is variable as you can pull more Gs higher up to bleed energy off or pull a steep down curve and keep as much as possible for a deep high speed intercept. This would also allow you to shoot down aircraft from space and attack ground targets by sheer kinetic penetration alone. Here again you have a small bursting charge to scatter heavy metal pellets into a killzone or keep it as a single chunk and slam into the ground at mach 10 and pulverize virtually anything short of a hardened bunker under meters and meters of concrete.

Ion thrusters tend to be slow...megawatt level microwave plasma on the other hand can pull real Gs and rapid inclination changes and or altitude changes as well. You need either a fast spectrum nuke reactor onboard or huge thin film solar with football field sized capture areas the first case is stealthy the latter not so much. But neither could be caught by ground launched interceptors as the delta V mismatch is too high. Only another megawatt scale hunter killer sat could chase it down.

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