WASHINGTON—The head of the Golden Dome program said CBO’s $1.2T cost estimate for the missile-defense program is way off base.
“They’re not estimating what we’re building,” Gen. Michael Guetlein said Thursday at Inside the Dome, hosted by Payload and Tectonic. The CBO estimate is an order of magnitude higher than the $185B figure put forward by Guetlein in March.
By the numbers: Guetlein claimed that the CBO used the cost of decades-old tech, designed for a different type of fight, to create its estimate—but that Golden Dome is a new architecture to meet the current threat.
“You can’t just take what we’ve done in the past and multiply it forward, or you’re going to get large numbers like what CBO got,” he said, adding that CBO did not ask his office for more details.
CBO acknowledged the estimate, which was requested by Congress, didn’t have visibility into the current planned architecture and was based on the January 2025 executive order.
The heart of the problem: While Golden Dome would rely on complicated tech—especially for space-based interceptors—Guetlein said he was confident that building the system is not a physics problem. Instead, he said the biggest hurdle facing the missile-defense system is cost and scale.
“If I cannot do something affordably and scalably, it doesn’t make sense as a nation to go after it because I cannot bankrupt the nation,” he said. “That’s a signal to industry that we have to simplify the solution…How can I get after this threat in this domain affordably and scalably? It requires you to think differently about the problem.”
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Blacknight Space Labs will provide five companies up to $100,000 each. In addition, accelerator companies will get startup 101 education, mentorship, assistance breaking into the defense space market—and help with everything from fundraising, to navigating the government contracting system, to finding customers.
The founder of the feast: The accelerator is backed by Blacknight Space Labs, an AI-driven modeling and simulation firm that offers services such as in-orbit mission simulation, and training exercises for space operations. The company will have a separate team running the program—and companies in the cohort will also get free access to its services.
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