Flood of questions leads Missile Defense Agency to push Golden Dome deadline one week

The Golden Dome missile-defense project has a lot of money, and contractors have a lot of questions—so many that the Missile Defense Agency has pushed back the deadline to submit proposals for a chunk of its $151 billion pot.  

Industry proposals for the Scalable Homeland Innovative Enterprise Layered Defense contract vehicle, or SHIELD, were originally due Oct. 10. However, due to “considerable interest” into the up-to-$151 billion, 10-year indefinite-quantity, indefinite-delivery contract, the deadline has been pushed to Oct. 16. 

“The solicitation posted on [Sept. 10] generated considerable interest, resulting in over 1,500 questions from industry,” said an Oct. 2 memo from the Missile Defense Agency. 

“The questions received were primarily focused on requests for clarification based on individual company interests/situations and resulted in very few updates to the solicitation," Mark Wright, a Missile Defense Agency spokesman, said later. "The extension is predominantly due to the sheer volume of answers for industry to review and not the updates to the solicitation.”

The flood of queries shows how eager industry is to get a slice of the Trump administration’s wildly ambitious missile shield, said Todd Harrison, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

“I think it’s an indication of strong industry interest, which is not surprising given the enormous amount of money already appropriated by Congress,” Harrison said. 

In May, the president claimed Golden Dome would cost around $175 billion, would be completed in about three years, and would be completely effective in keeping missiles from striking the continental United States.

The reconciliation bill passed this summer provided $25 billion for the project, but that, according to some estimates, is just a few percent of what it will ultimately cost..

In May, a Congressional Budget Office report said estimates ranged from $542 billion to $831 billion over 20 years. Last month, Harrison wrote that depending on the actual goals and scope, the project could cost from $252 billion to more than ten times as much.

“A system that protects against the full range of aerial threats posed by peer and near-peer adversaries could cost $3.6 trillion, and even then, it would fall short of the ‘100 percent’ effectiveness claimed,” Harrison wrote in a report. “In contrast, the $175 billion price tag President Trump cited only affords a much less capable system that is no match for the quantity of missiles China and Russia possess.”

The Trump administration has claimed Golden Dome can and will use interceptors on Earth and in orbit to mount defenses impenetrable by ballistic, cruise, and hypersonic missile. The project is overseen by Space Force Gen. Michael Guetlein, once vice chief of space operations.

In September, the Space Force began soliciting prototype proposals for its space-based interceptor program. Guetlein briefed members of the Senate Armed Services Committee members late last month, sparking skepticism among some Democratic lawmakers. 

Designing orbital interceptors will take a lot of money and effort, industry officials said at the Air & Space Force Association’s Air, Space and Cyber conference near Washington, D.C., last month. 

“It’s really a large system, engineering architecture problem and it's heavily driven by economics,” said Robert Fleming, corporate vice president and president of Northrop Grumman's Space Systems sector. “So, there’s a lot of work to be done, there’s money involved to get that figured out.”