Space Power: Trump’s New “Star Wars” Executive Order

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Space Power: Trump’s New “Star Wars” Executive Order

Transmission 2025-04

Laura Winter

Feb 03, 2025

Transcript

Hello again, dear Readers and Listeners,

The theme for this week could easily be “As The World Churns”. We’ve had two tragic and devastating airplane crashes, more executive orders; followed by memos concerning federal loans and grants, transgender military service members, the likely attempt to terminate thousands of F.B.I. agents, and which media outlets get dedicated and assigned desk-space inside the the Pentagon’s Correspondents Corridor, to name a few; and an email message, that may run afoul of statutory law, sent to what’s believed to be 2 million civil servants offering to buy them out if they agree by February 6 to leave government service.

What’s in this episode

I had promised a Part-2 episode exploring technological surprise and how the new administration should avoid it with the first U.S. Space Force Chief Scientist, but an important development has forced me to postpone that discussion.

This week we are concentrating on President Donald Trump’s executive order called “The Iron Dome For America”, which calls for a space-based missile shield. This new U.S. policy, issued on Monday, is expected to have huge ramifications for arms control in space, technology development, and the U.S. Space Force, that is if the U.S. Congress agrees to fund it.

There’s a lot to unpack. But before that discussion we have a short space threats assessment from the Space Information Sharing and Analysis Center’s Watch Center, that includes a bomb-threat.

But returning to the main subject… Trump’s “Iron Dome” executive order, like President Ronald Reagan’s 1983 Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), is a technically challenging and very expensive proposition, that could cost as much as $27B to develop, build, and launch. One of this week’s guests believes it could harken the establishment of a Department of the Space Force. It’s that big of deal.

Left: Cover of Der Spiegel magazine, 1983. Right: President Ronald Reagan announced the Strategic Defense Initiative in a nationally televised address on March 23, 1983.

On March 23, 1983, just two months before the much anticipated release of George Lucas’s third Star Wars movie “Episode 6 - Return of the Jedi”, Reagan used a nationally televised address to announce his SDI policy. Skeptics and political detractors dubbed Reagan’s initiative “Star Wars”.

Nevertheless, the Department of Defense stood up the Strategic Defense Initiative Organization, which in turn consolidated existing research, which had been underway since WWII, and invested in new basic research and science that formed the basis for today’s Space Development Agency (SDA) Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture (PWSA) program.

Before SDI was entirely abandoned, due mostly to the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, the program demonstrated its feasibility and produced a plethora of scientific and technical data and breakthroughs - space-based sensor technologies, lasers, railguns, particle beams, and computing. It also inspired new operational concepts, such as deploying large constellations of small satellites in Low Earth Orbit, also known as proliferated constellations.

The PWSA, considered one of the most successfully administered programs in the DoD, and is considered a congressional favorite. On January 15, SDA issued its annual Broad Agency Announcement requesting proposals, for “leap-ahead improvements for future Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture (PWSA) tranches, capability layers, or, enable new capability layers to address other emerging or evolving warfighter needs.”

Now more than four decades since Reagan’s announcement, the technology has advanced, launch costs have plummeted, and branding has become more astute. Trump’s executive order derives its namesake from Israel’s Iron Dome air defense system, which proved its utility in 2012 when, “More than 1,500 rockets were fired into Israel over the course of eight days. Iron Dome assessed that nearly 900 would land in open terrain. Of the remainder, the [Israel Defence Forces] boasted an interception rate above 85 percent.”

This week’s guests discuss questions such as “What are the technical hurdles?”, “How much would it cost?”, and “What could be the rough second and third order of effects?”

Who’s in this episode

Joel Mozer - the first United States Space Force Director of Science, Technology and Research
Peter Garretson, a Senior Fellow at the American Foreign Policy Council, and co-Author of the book “The Next Space Race: A Blueprint for American Primacy”
Hector Falcon - Watch Center Director, Space Information Sharing and Analysis Center (Space-ISAC)