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Pentagon sets funds and dates for secret Golden Dome space program. U.S. President Donald Trump makes an announcement regarding the Golden Dome missile defense shield in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington in May 2025. SHARE/SAVE Aug 8, 2026 The Pentagon aims to conduct the first tests for its futuristic space-based missile defense program by yearend, with flight demonstrations of the unproven technology slated for 2027, people familiar with the matter said. The key milestones are central to pioneering space-based missile interceptors, a pillar of President Donald Trump's $185 billion Golden Dome defense shield. The administration has set aside $3.2 billion to develop prototypes of weaponized satellites to shoot down missiles, with potentially tens of billions of dollars in future contracts. The U.S. Space Force is using an innovative acquisition strategy to attract both traditional and nontraditional vendors, a spokesperson said, adding that details around timelines and specific capabilities would not be released due to operational security. The program marks one of the most ambitious efforts to develop space-based missile defense since Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative during the Cold War, which was ultimately abandoned due to massive costs, technical challenges and lukewarm political support. Now, the Pentagon says the technology is needed more than ever to counter increasing threats from nuclear-armed nations like Russia and China. "A new generation of advanced air and missile threats, unprecedented in their speed, numbers, and lethality, now holds the American homeland at risk," Gen. Michael Guetlein, the Space Force official leading the Golden Dome effort, told lawmakers at a hearing in April. Space-based interceptors, which no country has yet deployed, are spacecraft that orbit the Earth at thousands of meters per second and are intended to track, detect and shoot down incoming ballistic missiles in the few minutes they travel through space to their intended target. In April, the Space Force announced that it had awarded 12 different companies, including SpaceX, Anduril Industries and Lockheed Martin, contracts to develop prototypes of these orbital interceptors. The Space Force's prototype program identified three types of interceptors it needed: boost-phase, just after a missile launches; midcourse, when it is traveling in space; and glide-phase, when it is back in the atmosphere. The program also includes contracts for firing systems, ground support and integrating future technology, according to people familiar with the matter. They spoke on condition of anonymity because the strategy is confidential. Pentagon officials have set a prize competition that pits teams against one another in a race to score funding each time they hit incremental milestones on the way to a final prototype. The milestones include a ground test, two flight tests in space and an intercept demonstration of the technology in 2029, according to people familiar with the matter. Along the way, companies will be weeded out based on cost, speed and performance. The government has not disclosed how large the reward for each milestone will be. However, a person familiar with the matter said the companies building midcourse interceptors can win roughly $60 million for completing a ground test by the end of this year. This ground test, at least for some companies, will require moving data from sensors to an interceptor and demonstrating their spacecraft's propulsion systems, said people familiar with the matter. Milestones two and three, the people said, are flight tests, in which the teams competing in that area will fire their interceptors into a target area in space, and are planned for 2027 and 2028. For the first flight test, companies building midcourse interceptors can win about $126 million, and the team that completes that test first will be awarded an additional $40 million, a person familiar with the matter said. After that, the Space Force may select only three out of the five teams to move forward, the person said. During the final demonstration planned for 2029, companies must show that their space-based interceptor can detect and shoot down a test target, people familiar with the matter said. The Space Force will then look to procure systems in 2030 from at least some teams that pass the final test. Still, experts are skeptical that the current effort isn't doomed to meet its end like Reagan's SDI. The Congressional Budget Office estimates it would cost more than $700 billion to launch a network of space-based interceptors to counter just a few missiles. Guetlein, the Space Force official, has said he only has about $185 billion to spend on the entire program. Even if it could be done affordably, Democratic lawmakers such as Massachusetts Sen. Ed Markey and California Rep. John Garamendi have raised concerns that placing weapons in orbit could lead to a destabilizing arms race with China and Russia. "It will quickly become obvious how expensive and challenging the system is," said Laura Grego, a senior director at the Union of Concerned Scientists. "I just have a hard time imagining this not collapsing under its own weight like it has every time before." In a time of both misinformation and too much information, quality journalism is more crucial than ever. By subscribing, you can help us get the story right.

Palladyne AI's swarmos(tm) successfully performs again at Army's premier division-scale test of future warfare. Advancing from the Ivy Mass rehearsal to Project Convergence Capstone 6, SwarmOS again integrated with Anduril's Lattice and enabled multi-drone, multi-vendor autonomous operations before the U.S. Joint Force and allied military partners Palladyne AI (NASDAQ: PDYN), a U.S.-based defense and industrial technology company delivering embodied AI-powered collaborative autonomy solutions, advanced avionics, precision-manufactured components, UAVs, and advanced aerospace engineering services, today announced the successful performance of its SwarmOS platform and Gremlin-X(TM) unmanned, reusable mini-bomber at Project Convergence Capstone 6 (PC-C6), the U.S. Army's culminating division-scale force-on-force modernization event. More headlines. Articles. PC-C6 marked the second time in less than three months that SwarmOS delivered multi-drone, multi-vendor autonomous operations under demanding, operationally realistic battlefield conditions. Following its successful performance at Ivy Mass, the 4th Infantry Division's risk-reduction rehearsal, SwarmOS advanced to a larger and more complex environment involving the Army and the broader U.S. Joint Force as well as military forces from some of America's closest allies. At both Ivy Mass and PC-C6, SwarmOS integrated with Anduril's Lattice platform, a key integration layer supporting the Army's Next Generation Command and Control architecture. SwarmOS provided the collaborative autonomy that enabled heterogeneous Group 1 and Group 2 unmanned aircraft from multiple manufacturers to operate together as one intelligent system. Additionally, at PC-C6, SwarmOS achieved Impact Level 5 (IL5) certification, meeting the Department of War's stringent cloud security requirements for higher-sensitivity unclassified mission data and mission-critical command-and-control (C2) workflows. During PC-C6 mission scenarios, SwarmOS enabled unmanned aircraft to collaboratively see, sense and strike targets while responding autonomously in real time as battlefield conditions evolved. SwarmOS coordinated the complete sensor-to-effects mission chain. Autonomous intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) aircraft searched for and identified targets of interest, shared targeting information through the Army's C2 environment and, with a soldier retaining decision authority, tasked Gremlin-X, Palladyne AI's low-cost mini-bomber, to engage the target. SwarmOS then coordinated post-strike battle damage assessment. "Ivy Mass was the rehearsal, and PC-C6 was the main event," said Doug Dynes, President of Palladyne Aerospace & Defense. "SwarmOS delivered in both environments, enabling aircraft from multiple manufacturers to find targets, share information, adapt to battlefield changes, and coordinate precision effects while a soldier retained authority over the decision to engage." The progression from Ivy Mass to PC-C6 represents the latest step in Palladyne AI's expanding work with the Army. With each successive event, SwarmOS has been required to integrate with more platforms, coordinate more complex mission workflows, and perform in increasingly demanding operational environments. At Ivy Mass, SwarmOS enabled drones from multiple manufacturers to operate under the supervision of a single soldier trained to use the system in less than 30 minutes. At PC-C6, Palladyne AI repeated and expanded that performance inside the Army's emerging C2 architecture and before a broader joint and multinational audience. "What differentiates SwarmOS is that it does more than automate individual aircraft or execute preplanned routes," said Dr. Denis Garagic, co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of Palladyne AI. "It enables heterogeneous unmanned systems to perceive, collaborate and adapt their actions in real time as the mission and battlefield change." PC-C6 is the largest Project Convergence experiment conducted to date. The event brings together the Army, other elements of the Joint Force and allied military partners to evaluate how emerging technologies can be integrated into operational formations and employed during large-scale combat operations. "The importance of PC-C6 is not simply that Palladyne AI participated in another exercise," said Ben Wolff, President and Chief Executive Officer of Palladyne AI. "The Army placed SwarmOS into an increasingly demanding progression of operational tests, and it delivered at every stage." "We have consistently told customers and shareholders that SwarmOS can transform unmanned systems from different manufacturers into an intelligent, collaborative force capable of responding in real time to changing battlefield conditions," Wolff continued. "That is no longer merely what the technology is designed to do. It is what SwarmOS has now repeatedly done in the operational environments that are helping shape how the Army expects to fight in the future." Unlike autonomy solutions designed around a particular aircraft or manufacturer, SwarmOS has been developed as a hardware-independent platform capable of coordinating unmanned systems with different designs, capabilities and mission roles. This approach allows military customers to combine new and existing systems from multiple vendors rather than becoming dependent on a single closed family of platforms. Palladyne AI believes the results at Ivy Mass and PC-C6 strengthen the company's position as the Army and the Department of War seek to deploy larger numbers of autonomous systems without creating an unsustainable command, communications or personnel burden. "The Army does not need thousands of disconnected drones, each requiring its own operator," Wolff said. "It needs diverse unmanned systems that can work together intelligently, adapt in real time and remain under effective human command. We believe SwarmOS has now demonstrated that capability at operational scale." About Palladyne Aerospace & Defense Palladyne Aerospace & Defense is Palladyne AI's division positioned as a mid-tier U.S. technology prime defense contractor. Palladyne Aerospace & Defense bridges innovative autonomy, practical engineering, and American production to bring intelligent systems into active service, faster, safer, and more cost-effectively than legacy approaches. With U.S.-based manufacturing, Palladyne Aerospace & Defense offers software, components, subsystems and UAVs aligned with the Department of War's growing demand for cost-effective, rapidly deployable, and domestically produced defense technologies. About Palladyne AI Palladyne AI is a U.S.-based technology company developing patented embodied artificial intelligence, collaborative autonomy solutions, and autonomous systems for defense and industrial markets. Palladyne AI delivers secure, American-developed and operated platforms designed to meet the stringent requirements of U.S. government and public-sector customers, including data sovereignty, security, and compliance. Palladyne AI's embodied AI is designed to operate in complex, contested, and high-risk environments, enabling distributed tasking, human-on-the-loop decision-making, degraded-communications resilience, and multi-domain coordination. Its platform-agnostic autonomy stack combines real-time sensor fusion, adaptive AI models, and edge-native orchestration to support autonomous and collaborative systems across air, ground, maritime, and industrial domains. For more information about Palladyne AI, including GuideTech and Palladyne Aerospace & Defense, please visit www.palladyneai.com.