Donald Trump has many grand plans for America, one of the more ambitious of which is to create a giant invisible space shield that theoretically protects the country from rockets. In January, Trump announced, via executive order, the creation of a “Golden Dome,” designed to protect Americans from the “threat of attack by ballistic, hypersonic, and cruise missiles, and other advanced aerial attacks.” The project, Trump said, would use a network of satellites to detect and repel aerial attacks on the U.S. and end “the missile threat to the American homeland.”
Unfortunately for Trump, many critics say that building such a Dome isn’t really possible and, even if it were, it’s not clear that it would actually protect Americans all that much. Whatever the murky feasibility of realizing Trump’s golden space shield dream, one thing’s for sure: the Dome will surely cost Americans a pretty penny.
Ars Technica reports that, according to recent estimates, the cost of the dome would be substantially more than the Manhattan Project, which developed America’s first atomic bomb. That project, which created an incredibly powerful weapon that actually works (about 200,000 people died to prove it), cost America approximately $35 billion (estimate here adjusted for inflation). Trump’s new project could cost 100 times that much.
This week, Bloomberg reported that the Pentagon had “completed a blueprint for the program, but the Pentagon declined to give any details about its scope or cost.” The study cited by Ars comes from Todd Harrison, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Harrison’s research found that, of several different dome architectures that could be pursued, the least expensive option would cost some $252 billion. Meanwhile, the most expensive option would cost approximately $3.6 trillion through 2045, the outlet notes. The White House has claimed that the dome will cost $175 billion.
Why won’t Trump’s magic shield in the sky work? A report published in April by the American Physical Society Panel on Public Affairs said the following: “When engineers have been under intense political pressure to deploy a system, the United States has repeatedly initiated costly programs that proved unable to deal with key technical challenges and were eventually abandoned as their inadequacies became apparent.” In other words, the Golden Shield may end up being an ambitious project that serves, mostly, to fatten the pockets of the contractors who work on it.
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