Anduril Industries announced Tuesday in Washington that it will lead a consortium to develop Golden Dome space interceptors for the United States Space Force under the Trump administration’s missile defence initiative.
The company said the team includes Impulse Space, Inversion Space, K2 Space, Sandia National Laboratories and Voyager Technologies.
Anduril says the Space-Based Interceptor program aims to deploy weapons in orbit so the US military can engage missile threats earlier in flight than existing ground-based systems can.
The Department of Defence has awarded 12 companies contracts worth up to $3.2 billion combined to develop space-based missile defence interceptor systems.
Other contract recipients include Northrop Grumman, RTX’s Raytheon, SpaceX and Lockheed Martin, according to the program details.
Gokul Subramanian, Anduril’s senior vice president of engineering, said in a statement that near-peer adversaries had invested in “highly manoeuvrable vehicles,” creating new challenges for US homeland defence.
The program aims to demonstrate an integrated interceptor capability within the Golden Dome architecture by around 2028.
The Golden Dome program could cost $185 billion and would include expanded ground-based interceptors, sensors, command-and-control systems, and space-based elements to detect, track, and potentially counter incoming threats from orbit.
General Michael Guetlein, director of the Space Force’s Golden Dome, has described the Space-Based Interceptor program as the initiative’s highest-risk element due to scalability and affordability challenges.
