When I first reported on President Donald Trump’s promise to “BUILD A GREAT IRON DOME MISSILE DEFENSE SHIELD,” an expert summed up the idea as “the insane ramblings of a senile old person.” But, with Trump in office, the “Iron Dome for America” plan is seemingly happening—and the project’s benefits for some of the most powerful people in the world are coming into focus.
In late January, Trump announced details for the Dome. A land-based missile-interceptor system—like the one Israel has—would not be possible to build for a country the size of the United States. Instead, military commentators coalesced around another plan: build a cloud of “satellite missile interceptors” similar to former President Ronald Reagan’s ill-fated 1980s “Star Wars” proposal.
In turn, the US Missile Defense Agency asked defense companies on January 31 to pitch space-based sensors and interceptors that could detect and defeat “advanced aerial threats” from low-space orbit. That means the proposed Iron Dome would almost certainly require thousands of satellites for putting interceptor weapons in space.
The company that currently dominates the market for such equipment? Elon Musk’s SpaceX.
“SpaceX is the only company that currently has the capacity to launch that many things,” Dr. Laura Grego of the Union of Concerned Scientists told Mother Jones. “They’re such a critical resource at this point that…if you’re going to launch a lot of things, SpaceX is going to be in the mix.”
There are—according to astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell, who maintains a count of pretty much everything orbiting this planet—just over 11,000 working satellites in orbit. 6998 of them are Starlink satellites. That means 62 percent of all working satellites orbiting this planet belong to a company started byElon Musk, a drastic increase from only 5 years ago. More critically: SpaceX has the necessary launch capacity to send thousands of load-bearing satellites into orbit. They already handle the majority of NASA’s launches, for billions of dollars each year.
“So, yeah, they’d make a ton of money,” Grego said. “And companies building these interceptors would make a ton of money.”
A paper published in February by the National Security Space Association—a military-industrial think tank—highlights this further: though it might not be capable of efficiently stopping intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), a satellite missile-interceptor system like the proposed American Iron Dome cloud would be uniquely capable of getting Elon Musk paid.
NSSA’s Chris Williams estimated that an Iron Dome for America would require about 1,500 “space-based interceptor” satellites in low-earth orbit. This, he said, would only be possible because “the advent of low-cost launch, enabled by SpaceX, significantly reduces the anticipated cost.”
Todd Harrison of the American Enterprise Institute put the likely cost at somewhere between $11 and $27 billion for such a system—and pointed out that despite all that money, the system would only be able to intercept up to two rockets at a time. (For context, two is a small number. The Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation estimates that China has over 100 ICBMS, Russia has over 300, and the US has over 400.)
“You need something like three interceptors to have a pretty good chance of taking down one incoming ICBM,” said John Erath, CACNP’s Policy Director. “So the numbers add up quickly, and the math isn’t good.”
While technology has improved since Reagan dreamed of space lasers, Erath said, “that does not necessarily make it easy.”
“You might say that protecting an American city from a nuclear attack is worth billions. That may be correct, but this is the kind of thing that needs to be discussed in Congress before it’s approved,” he added. “If you could even get to where a system like this could be made to work, the costs would be literally astronomical. That needs to be made clear to the taxpayers, who would be ultimately paying the bills.”
Pavel Podvig, a senior researcher at the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research, said many missile-shield plans have come and gone since the first anti-ballistic missile system was proposed by Soviet scientists in the early 1960s. But outside of spatially limited cases like Israel’s, he’s never seen missile shield technology make anyone safer.
“Things are very different in the nuclear context,” he said. In practice, building elaborate missile shield systems might just encourage other countries to build more missiles. During the Cold War, he explained, the Soviet Union deployed a ground-based missile defense system around Moscow. And rather than deterring tensions, it inflamed them. “[The United States] knew there was a missile defense,” he said, so “they ended up allocating, I think, 60 warheads against Moscow.” (Now, Russian spokespeople are calling the American Iron Dome plan an attempt to turn space into “an arena of armed confrontation.”)
Grego, of the Union of Concerned Scientists, called the re-emergent idea a “fantasy,” more a branding attempt than a useful proposition.
“Invoking Iron Dome is just marketing, trying to manufacture credibility for something that has never worked,” she said. Instead of wasting money on the unachievable, she said, US efforts would be better spent on nuclear disarmament—something Trump threw his support behind this week. But paying companies like SpaceX to create an “American Iron Dome,” Grego argued, would have the opposite of that effect.
“Missile defenses are not a useful or long-term strategy for keeping the US safe from nuclear weapons,” she said.
