The Golden Dome: A 'risky fantasy'?
'Golden Dome could be the single most dangerous idea Trump has ever proposed.'
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Hello, and welcome to this week’s edition of The View from Space.
⭐️ In an interactive long-read for the Washington Post, Christian Davenport, William Neff and Aaron Steckelberg ask whether President Trump’s Golden Dome will address ‘a glaring U.S. vulnerability’ or ignite an arms race that will last generations:
‘Golden Dome would radically reshape military doctrine and further militarize space, an effort that’s been compared to the rush to build the atomic bomb during World War II and the Apollo moon landings. Yet it still may not come close to providing the kind of comprehensive protection Trump says it will. …
Critics deride the most ambitious part of the program — flooding low Earth orbit with thousands of satellites to detect and take out adversaries’ missiles — as a fantasy that will only destabilize the fragile international order that has prevented nuclear war for more than 70 years.
“Golden Dome could be the single most dangerous idea Trump has ever proposed, and that’s saying something,” Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Massachusetts), a member of the Armed Services Committee, said in an interview.
Proponents counter that because of expanding threats, as well as dramatic technological advances, the time is right to resurrect the Reagan-era Strategic Defense Initiative, known as “Star Wars,” that fizzled out at the end of the Cold War. For years, defense hawks have pushed for a more robust missile-defense shield, citing the unsettling truth that the United States doesn’t have a comprehensive way to protect its homeland.
China and Russia, meanwhile, are already expanding their nuclear arsenals in the largest long-range weapons buildup since the Cold War. They are adding hundreds of intercontinental ballistic missiles as well as new weapons systems, including hypersonic weapons designed to speed toward U.S. cities at more 4,000 mph, according to intelligence officials.
🌍 Our very own Managing Director, Victoria Pearson, argues in SpaceNews that the outage of Amazon Web Services has exposed Europe’s reliance on foreign providers for critical infrastructure:
‘The AWS outage was a technical failure. But the fact is that the world is becoming more dangerous. Hostile states are probing Western networks daily, searching for vulnerabilities. Satellites are being jammed, spoofed and attacked in orbit and cyber-threats are growing more and more sophisticated. Relying on a handful of foreign technology providers is a strategic risk, not merely a commercial one; and incidents like the Amazon Web Services outage serve to signal to hostile actors how dependent we have become.
If we find ourselves at war with one of those hostile actors — some senior officials in the U.K. believe we are already at war with Russia — then that war will be fought at ‘machine speed’. This is how the Commander of UK Space Command described the pace of a conflict fought with satellites, sensors and AI. Resilience will come down to infrastructure, and who owns, builds and secures it. Europe can’t afford to discover too late in the day that the foundations of its digital economy lie elsewhere and out of its control.
The space sector makes for an illuminating case study. Europe’s space industry is growing fast, with new entrants from across the continent pushing the boundaries of what’s possible in launch, Earth observation, communications, navigation and countless other areas. Yet much of this ecosystem still depends on non-European providers – most noticeably Elon Musk’s SpaceX. Though the aim of the Airbus-Thales-Leonardo merger is to build a “European champion” to rival SpaceX, it doesn’t look likely that this will really happen for some time. It’s unlikely that SpaceX will pull the rug out from under European space. But the fact that it could, and that this would leave Europe struggling to compete in space, is a worry, and one that should make us think about critical infrastructure elsewhere and who controls it.’
↔️ In Payload, senior European investors including NewSpace Capital’s Daniel Biedermann, weighed in on the impact of the Airbus, Thales and Leonardo merger:
‘While news of the merger made a big splash in the headlines, it will take years to bring the companies together. There’s also no guarantee that the combination will be any better than the sum of its parts, investors told Payload.
“These organizations, they will not change overnight to become much more dynamic and agile. It’s just not going to happen,” NewSpace Capital Investment Partner Daniel Biedermann told Payload. “It will take time for them, and that also gives opportunity for good startups and good scale-ups to actually position themselves in the market.”
As investors explained, Airbus, Thales, and Leonardo have spent years telegraphing their intention to merge, which gave the investment community an opportunity to target aspects of the market that would remain lucrative.
“These three companies separately today are present across many parts of the space value chain, but on a day-to-day basis, I don’t think they are affecting a lot of the venture funded space economy,” said Filip Kocian, an investor at Expansion Ventures. “Outside of the massive billion-[Euro]-plus government contracts, I would say startups have a very solid chance to compete.”
🛡️ In SpaceNews, Jeff Foust reports on ESA’s ‘multi-pronged security programme’:
‘The program [will] include imaging, navigation and communications capabilities for security-related uses ranging from defense to crisis response. It is driven by growing security threats to Europe, particularly from Russia, as well as the perception that the continent can no longer rely primarily on the United States for defense.
“In this moment of rapid change, there is a critical need to synchronize European initiatives by aligning space for defense competencies, avoiding duplication and pooling resources for scale,” [ESA chief] Josef Aschbacher said in prepared remarks. “We still remain too fragmented to guarantee Europe genuine, comprehensive and autonomous space resilience.”
European Resilience from Space (ERS) is one of the cornerstone proposals in the package ESA will present to its member states at the Nov. 26–27 ministerial conference in Bremen, Germany. Aschbacher said at an Oct. 23 briefing after an ESA Council meeting that he was seeking “a bit above one billion” euros for ERS.
In an online briefing during the Brussels conference, he said the program has a total value of 1.2 billion euros ($1.4 billion). The largest component is in Earth observation, where ESA is proposing to spend 750 million euros to begin developing a constellation of imaging satellites. That effort will start with a “virtual” system combining existing satellites operated by individual European countries.’
🚀 A Japanese travel agency is planning to offer point-to-point transport services between Tokyo and U.S. cities like New York, using space technology to cut travel time to just 60 minutes. TTW reports:
‘The proposed service would involve launching a transport vehicle from an offshore location, designed to travel through outer space and provide rapid, efficient connectivity between any two points on Earth. The companies involved have stated that the service will be able to connect major cities worldwide, with a particular focus on reducing travel times between Japan and the United States, revolutionizing long-haul travel.
The estimated cost of a round-trip ticket for this futuristic travel experience will be around 100 million yen ($657,000), marking a premium offering aimed at early adopters and affluent customers. While the cost is high, it reflects the cutting-edge technology and the exclusive nature of space travel.’
🗑️ The Indian Express calls Earth’s orbit ‘a floating landfill’, and that if debris grows unchecked, collisions will become more frequent:
‘Earth’s orbit has become a classic “commons” — a shared resource nobody owns and everyone uses. Satellites for communications, weather, navigation, research all share the same orbital lanes. But when one actor launches a payload, discards a rocket stage or breaks something into pieces, the risk spreads to all. As astrophysicist Nicholas Johnson warned years ago: “The greatest risk to space missions comes from non-trackable debris.”
Space was first littered not by emerging nations, but by the world’s most advanced ones. The early decades of the space race — led by the United States and the Soviet Union — introduced thousands of rockets, boosters and test payloads into orbit, often without any plans for retrieval. Cold War rivalries meant prestige mattered more than sustainability. Every launch left behind upper stages, fuel tanks, nuts and bolts — each now a potential bullet in orbit.