How industry is lining up for big Golden Dome business

SMD 2025 — Defense Department personnel may have been told not to bring up the Trump administration’s Golden Dome project at this year’s Space and Missile Defense Symposium, but that certainly didn’t stop industry from taking the opportunity to hawk their wares in hopes of grabbing a piece of the high-dollar, if largely undefined initiative.

Defense primes Northrop Grumman and Lockheed, as well as Leidos, held media briefings to discuss their existing technologies and know-how they believe could be brought to bear. Boeing put out a press release on the eve of the show citing its expertise on integrated air and missile defense; and Breaking Defense spoke to senior officials at RTX and L3Harris about what they see as their companies’ possible contributions.

While some of America’s largest defense firms appear to be making a play for leadership or integrator for the sprawling project, which already has $25 billion set aside as down payment in the recently passed reconciliation package, other firms are highlighting specific capabilities they can bring to bear.

For instance, Leidos CEO Tom Bell told reporters on Thursday that in reconciliation there’s “$4 to $5 billion in support of products within the needs of the Golden Dome. So these are ground based radars, counter-UAS, low-cost missiles, hypersonics, space-based capabilities.”

“I don’t think Leidos has a play to be Mr. Golden Dome,” Bell said. “But when it comes to the ground layer and air defenses against counter UAS, air defenses against cruise missiles — we have robust capabilities there. When it comes to border surveillance — passive and active radars, the capabilities to know what’s happening over the horizon and around the borders of America — that’s very much where we are. When it comes to the space layer and having pervasive understanding of what’s coming our way, even hypersonic capabilities coming to America, we’re on the leading edge of that with our wide field of view payloads that are the only payloads in orbit right now actually giving actionable data up to the warfighter.”

L3Harris is in the happy position of being one of two companies, along with Northrop Grumman, with an existing system mentioned by name in President Donald Trump’s January executive order on Golden Dome: the Hypersonic and Ballistic Tracking Space Sensor (HBTSS). The order calls for “acceleration of the deployment of HBTSS.” Two prototype satellites carrying the sensor were built, one by each firm, and launched last February for the Missile Defense Agency (MDA) in conjunction with the Space Development Agency (SDA). The firm also is making satellites for SDA’s missile tracking constellation.

To support a potential HBTSS production increase, L3Harris is “really focused on it from a readiness perspective, making sure we have the capacity … and the processes in place,” Josh Lovejoy, general manager for Proliferated Missile Defense, told Breaking Defense. “We’ve been working to make sure we we’re learning everything we can from our on-orbit sensors, and we have the facilities in place to be ready.”

L3Harris in April cut the ribbon on an addition of 95,000 square feet for payload integration to their facility in Fort Wayne, Ind., and Lovejoy said the company plans to expand space vehicle integration facility in Melbourne, Fla.

Northrop Grumman is “viewing this as a once in a generation opportunity … and Northrop Grumman is all in on Golden Dome for America,” Raymond Sharp, vice president of programs now charged with overseeing the company’s Golden Dome approach, told reporters on Tuesday. “So we have ready-now kit, as well as technology that can rapidly be developed to support some of the novel challenges that we foresee.”

“Ready-now” systems, he elaborated, include everything from “left-of-launch” capabilities such the MQ-4C Triton high-altitude reconnaissance drone in service with the Navy, to the “130 satellites” the company is building for the SDA’s Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture in low Earth orbit, to its work for the MDA on modernizing the ground system for the Ground-Based Midcourse Defense system.

Jim Kalberer, who leads Northrop Grumman’s propulsion business, elaborated on the firm’s large solid rocket motor efforts, as well as tactical motors and “advanced propulsion” systems.

“For almost 70 years, Northrop Grumman has been delivering solid rocket motors to deter, defend, defeat threats, to launch payloads to space, to explore beyond our planet,” Kalberer said. “So we have a lot of experience in history in delivering solid rocket motors at scale. … [E]xecuting on Golden Dome is going to require solid rocket motor capacity for the types of the types of systems, interceptors that will be used against varying threats at varying ranges.”

Raymond also referenced Northrop Grumman’s contract with MDA for the Glide Phase Interceptor as a foundation for what it hopes will be future work on space-based interceptors (SBIs) for Golden Dome, stressing the company’s long history of interceptor work dating back to President Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI).

Northrop Grumman “was the prime contractor on the SBI component for SDI back in the Reagan years, and so we’re continuing to develop and test SBI technologies,” he said, adding that the company further has responded to the agency’s February request for information on Golden Dome enabling technologies with regard to SBIs.

Tom Laliberty, president of Land & Air Defense Systems at Raytheon, told Breaking Defense that parent company RTX can bring capabilities across the spectrum for a layered defense approach to “integrated air and missile defense,” including space and counter-UAS systems.

“What we’ve done is we’ve stood up a team essentially to focus on the initiative and to essentially make sure that we’re bringing all the capabilities that Raytheon, and the other parts of RTX for that matter, have to offer as part of the solution set,” he said.

While noting that much of the company’s work in space is classified, he said Raytheon has “a variety of capabilities from sensors to effectors to comms equipment” that can be brought to bear for detecting, tracking and defeating long-range missile threats.

“We’ve got various capabilities along that significant kill chain to address that that long-range threat,” he said. “We have a variety of missile defense sensors like the AN/TPY-2 radar, that’s part of THAAD. We’ve got the Sea-based X-band Radar that’s part of the GMD [Ground-based Midcourse Defense] system. We’ve got the very long range early warning radars also part of the GMD system. And then we’ve got effectors like Standard Missile-3, and then things like kill vehicles on the GBIs [Ground-Based Interceptors]. Those all kind of play in that space and the edge of space portion of the mission.”

The company also the maker of the venerable Patriot missile that provides close-in terminal phase missile defense to a number of militaries around the world.

Patriot is “essentially the foundation for significant amount of integrated air missile defense that happens in the world today. We’ve got 19 nations fielding Patriot today; just a tremendous track record of battle-proven success,” Laliberty said.

“The innovation with Patriot that’s coming next is the Lower Tier Air and Missile Defense Sensor, also called LTAMDS,” he said. “So that’s a 360 degree sensor … so you get 360 degree degrees of capability that leverages gallium nitride technology, which was pioneered here at Raytheon.”

The Army in April green-lit initial production of LTAMDS as part of its Integrated Air and Missile Defense system.

Meanwhile Lockheed Martin also is stressing it’s wide-ranging missile and air defense systems, as well as its ability to serve as an integrator of large systems-of-systems.

“So when Lockheed Martin talks about its position and readiness to support the mission of Golden Dome, I want to talk about that today in three specific areas: domain expertise, technology that’s ready now and near term, and then investments that can bring that capability to the warfighter,” Dan Nimblett, vice president of Layered Homeland Defense, told reporters on Monday.

Lockheed Martin has systems operating today “supporting space operations, air operations, land and sea, undersea. And then we have a proven track record of integrating across those domains,” he said. Relative to technology, there’s a list of many of the systems … and many more on the horizon that are ready to be fielded rapidly in accordance with the requirements of the executive order in this time frame.”

Amanda Pound, director of Mission Strategy and Advanced Capabilities, Space, stressed that the company believes much of the technology to enable Golden Dome already exists and cited the relevance of Lockheed Martin’s ongoing work with SDA on development of the Tracking Layer of orbiting satellites, as well as the company’s history of working on past missile defense programs.

“In fact, we Lockheed have been working the space layers for decades,” she said. “We have been working on this capability over time. We haven’t been advancing and investing in this capability, and we believe that we’re ready, along with all of industry, to answer the call,” she said. “So, space-based interceptors. The goal is by 2028 to field an on-orbit demonstration. We are ready. We have capability to do that.”

In particular, she mentioned the Homing Overlay Experiment tested in 1984 — which the Army claims as the first hit-to-kill missile — and the SDI program’s Brilliant Pebbles project aimed at creating an SBI system.

Sarah Reeves, vice president for the company’s Next Generation Interceptor program, said that lessons learned from that program as the missile begins the process of critical design review will help inform Golden Dome work.

“So key differences between the existing GBI and Next Generation Interceptor are we have multiple kill vehicles, and what that does is it brings a substantial increase in firepower. And what that does for the war fighter is it helps to also preserve inventory,” she said.

Lockheed Martin officials said the company also has established a new “prototyping environment” for “collaborative” development of command and control systems for Golden Dome — something that is going to be critical for patching various systems together and making them work as one.

“If you want to have the greatest capability for command and control, you need to take that optimal information, the best information possible, and then connect that with making sure that we have the maximum amount of time to make the decision. Then we can orchestrate, then we can optimize, and then we can create the best defense possible against the various threats that can present themselves, because they’re not going to come in one time, they’re going to come in a layer, they’re going to come in a series of waves, and we have to be ready,” said Thad Beckert, head of strategy and business development for the company’s Rotary & Mission System unit.

The new prototyping hub is located at Lockheed Martin’s Center for Innovation in Suffolk, Va., also known as The Lighthouse.

Boeing, in an Aug. 4 press release, highlighted its past work on missile defense sensing and tracking, its prime contractor role for GMD and the shorter range Arrow missiles used by Israel, and in “developing directed energy and efficient kinetic air defense solutions against lower-tier threats.” The release also stressed the firms expertise in “integrating air, space and ground-based systems into advanced architectures.”

The release summed up: “Simply put, Boeing is uniquely positioned to help turn the vision of a dynamic next-generation defense capability for America into a reality.”

From here, it’ll be left to the Pentagon, specifically Golden Dome czar Gen. Michael Guetlein to sort out just what to do with all those offerings, with a White House occupant eager to see results before his term is over.

Valerie Insinna contributed to this report.