WASHINGTON — Pentagon officials overseeing Golden Dome are trying to convince commercial space founders, venture investors and software companies that missile defense can be built more like a modern technology platform than a traditional weapons system.
That effort is reshaping the ecosystem forming around Golden Dome, President Donald Trump’s proposed missile defense architecture intended to defend the U.S. homeland against ballistic, cruise and hypersonic missiles. The initiative envisions a layered network of sensors, communications systems and potentially space-based interceptors capable of tracking and engaging threats across air, ground and space domains.
The technical challenges are immense. So are the economic ones.
At conferences, industry meetings and investor gatherings, Golden Dome officials have been signaling that the Pentagon cannot build the system using conventional defense acquisition models alone. Instead, they are looking to commercial space manufacturing, reusable launch systems, software-driven operations and private investment capital as ways to reduce costs and accelerate timelines.
“Our intent is to build a gateway that will provide a single point of entry for anyone that wants to come in and see the Golden Dome problem set … and then provide innovative solutions that perhaps we haven’t even thought about yet,” Marcia Holmes, deputy director of Golden Dome for America, said last week at a conference hosted by Tectonic & Payload.
The Pentagon’s outreach reflects a recognition that many of the technologies relevant to Golden Dome are now emerging from commercial firms rather than exclusively from traditional defense contractors. Officials are particularly focused on whether private-sector production techniques can solve what Gen. Michael Guetlein, the head of Golden Dome, has repeatedly described as the central issue: affordability at scale.
The administration wants to demonstrate an operational capability by 2028. Yet the most controversial piece of the architecture — space-based interceptors designed to destroy missiles during the boost phase shortly after launch — remains both technically unproven at operational scale and financially contentious.
The Congressional Budget Office estimated that a missile defense architecture broadly aligned with Trump’s executive order could cost $1.2 trillion over 20 years, with orbital interceptors accounting for most of the spending.
The report intensified scrutiny around whether commercial-style manufacturing can truly transform the economics of missile defense.
Vetting new vendors
Holmes said the program office is trying to create an environment where startups, venture-backed firms and traditional defense companies can work together while the Pentagon evaluates which industrial capabilities and pools of private capital are available to support the effort.
Because much of Golden Dome remains classified, companies often cannot learn what specific technical problems the Pentagon is trying to solve until they undergo security vetting.
“Once we get those vendors and those non-traditional partners into our GDA ecosystem hub,” Holmes said, “then we can run through the security vetting, and we can get down to the next level of detail that everyone is asking for.”
The office plans additional outreach events in coming months, part of a broader attempt to signal to the investment community that missile defense demand will persist for years regardless of political cycles.
“The threat is not going away. Homeland defense isn’t going away. Missile defense isn’t going away,” Holmes said.
Still, the government faces an awkward balancing act. Officials want more commercial participation while simultaneously restricting information because of concerns over espionage and cyber threats.
Holmes acknowledged that access to Golden Dome decision makers remains difficult for new entrants. “We are showing up at events like this, and we’re listening, and we’re available to listen and take your ideas and apply them to our problem set and give you feedback,” she said.
One area where the collaboration is most visible is the so-called command-and-control consortium, a group of defense and technology companies working with the Pentagon to develop the networking architecture connecting sensors, tracking systems, operators and interceptors.
Guetlein has described the consortium as a collaborative structure in which companies hold separate contracts but operate as an integrated team rather than isolated competitors. The group initially included six unidentified companies before expanding to nine with the addition of Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and Northrop Grumman.
Maj. Gen. Mark Piper, deputy director of operations at the North American Aerospace Defense Command, said operators with recent combat experience are working directly alongside software developers.
“We want to make sure that what we are building is something that can actually be used by the warfighters to accomplish the mission that we have been given,” Piper said.
The goal is to accelerate software updates and operational feedback loops.
“By having that integration from the beginning, we can literally make software updates based upon operator input in hours, not in months or years,” Piper said.
‘Left of bang’ solutions
The Pentagon is also interested in what officials describe as “left of bang” approaches — capabilities intended to identify or disrupt threats before missile interceptors are needed.
That has created opportunities for companies focused on data fusion, artificial intelligence, early warning systems and software integration.
“The entirety of our business is what we call ‘left of bang,’” said Jake Swenson, president of Lyntris, a company formed through the merger of Accelint and Vitesse Systems.
As missile defense systems accumulate more sensors and more streams of data, companies say the harder challenge is no longer collection but processing and decision-making.
Madison Dye, vice president of business development at Lyntris, said integrating data fast enough to support operational decisions remains a major obstacle.
“We can collect it, but can we use it together and then get it to a general to make a decision in the right amount of time to where it actually matters?” Dye said. “That has been by far the hardest part of the equation.”
Retired Lt. Gen. Stephen Twitty, former deputy commander of U.S. European Command, described military operations centers overwhelmed by disconnected systems and unusable information.
“You see all these boxes. You see all these fiber optic cables. You see all these panes of glasses everywhere, and you ask yourself, what does it all mean?” Twitty said.
The military’s data architecture, he argued, remains fragmented by stovepipes that slow decision-making.
“We got all this data coming in that we really don’t need,” Twitty said. “It’s just data because it’s sexy.”
Cultural barriers create obstacles, Dye said. Classified work environments, clearance processes and hardware-centric procurement systems, he added, make it difficult for commercial firms to move quickly.
“Building hardware in a classified area is hard, getting clearances to have conversations is hard,” Dye said. “These are small things that need to change and we need to adapt the environments to make it more conducive to build faster.”
At the same time, the Pentagon is asking companies to shoulder financial risk.
The Space Force is running the space-based interceptor development program through Other Transaction Authority agreements that provide limited early funding while expecting companies to invest some of their own capital during prototyping. The model is intended to encourage competition and lower government costs, but it also forces companies to convince investors that eventual production contracts will materialize.
Even Rogers, chief executive of True Anomaly, said firms working on the interceptor effort are operating under firm fixed-price contracts and must persuade investors that the economics can work.
“Is there political risk? Yes,” Rogers said.
The technical risks are equally daunting.
Impulse Space Chief Operating Officer Eric Romo said many individual technologies relevant to orbital missile intercept have been demonstrated independently, but integrating them into a functioning operational system remains extraordinarily difficult.
People often describe missile interception as “a bullet hitting a bullet,” Romo said, but space-based interceptors are “an order of magnitude harder than that.”
Impulse Space is working with Anduril Industries on interceptor development.
Greg Kuperman, senior director of engineering at Anduril, said affordability remains the decisive question. “We have to incorporate technologies that have been commercially developed, that have been tested, that are leveraged in mass manufacturing, that can actually truly scale,” he said.
Romo said the recent CBO report was a “shot across the bow” that raised the stakes for industry.
“I think it actually puts the burden and onus on us to show we can do better,” he said. “We’re all investing on hope that this actually does get in there and we get to production,” he said. “But that’s not guaranteed.”
