The Race to Build Trump’s ‘Golden Dome’ Missile Defense System Is On

While the American army has spent an anti -missile defense in recent decades, it has “little to show” for this, maintains a recently revised report Published by The Panel on Public Affairs of the American Physical Society, a non -profit organization looking for physics and other scientific questions.

The authors, who noted that the American defense of anti -missile defense generally increases only in response to things like “presidential advocacy”, concluded that the current America system could not reliably remove the missiles and warheads from North Korea, not to mention the attacks of more sophisticated actors.

Montgomery said to Wired that the United States should be particularly concerned about long-range ballistic and hypersonic missiles in China, Russia and Iran.

Go to space

Laura Grego, main research director at the union of scientists concerned and co-author of the report, explains that she explains why the Trump administration wants the ability to launch missile interceptors from space.

Interceptors launched from land sites may have to travel hundreds of kilometers horizontally, while a space interceptor must travel a short distance to reach a missile and stop it in its footsteps. “The intuition of most people is that space is far away,” says Grego. “But in this case, the space is close. The space is about as close as possible.”

Grego adds that the idea of ​​building a system of futuristic anti -missiles in the sky concerned American leaders during and deactivated for decades. President Ronald Reagan proposed a similar plan in the early 1980s nicknamed the “Star Wars” program by critics, which included a space Laser system to shoot down ballistics. While the types of technologies that Reagan has offered to use were not possible At the time, they are now, says Grego.

Montgomery says that the American government will probably have to choose between building a new space system or building its terrestrial system, because it would simply be too expensive to do both. “If you take this second path of the inherited systems now, you will inevitably lead to your space funding later,” he said.

But Grego says that she thinks that a spatial missile missile interceptor system would be very vulnerable and impractical, as it requires the use of missile interceptors transported on board satellites. Since satellites are constantly moving compared to the surface of the earth, the United States would need an astronomical quantity of interceptors to provide complete protection.

Grego says it only works when it is completely complete. “If you are able to separate this constellation and hit holes using anti-satellite weapons or other types of system attacks, all of this becomes fundamentally useless,” she explains.

Grego adds that a space -based interceptor system would likely cost thousands of dollars between construction, launch and replacement of interceptors – even considering the new technologies developed by SpaceX have contributed to considerably reducing the cost of satellite launches in recent years. The satellites surrounding the earth in low terrestrial orbit also fall into the atmosphere and burn after about three to five years, which means that the components will have to be replaced regularly.