Shield & Spear: The Age of Maneuver

For sixty years, the United States has defended itself mostly from the ground: radars, sensors, and interceptors rooted to the Earth. That center of gravity is moving to orbit. “A lot of how that’s being done can’t be discussed in a room like this,” Space Capital CEO & Founder Chad Anderson told the audience as he opened the session. “So we’re not here for the secrets. We are here for the direction.”

To map that shift, Anderson sat down with two people who see it from complimentary positions. Marcia Holmes, Deputy Director of Golden Dome for America, is the architect: she helps define what the largest defensive space architecture the country has ever attempted is made of, and who builds it. Eric Romo, President and COO of Impulse Space, a Space Capital portfolio company, is the builder: his company makes vehicles that move. The idea the conversation kept circling back to is that in orbit, the shield and the spear increasingly run on the same hardware.

The threat that forced the call

Holmes did not soften the picture. “The threat is real. It’s complex, and it’s growing,” she said. Russia has fielded hypersonic and Avangard systems and used them on the battlefield in Ukraine; China is “projected to field over 1,000 intercontinental ballistic missiles,” doubling its arsenal. Cruise missiles, hypersonics, and ballistic missiles can now range the United States directly. “Our homeland is no longer a sanctuary,” she said. “Golden Dome is a historic call to action for us to do something different.”

Doing something different means going up. Ground-based systems cannot see the newest threats early enough. “We have to go to space to see them from launch all the way through their flight trajectories,” Holmes said, and to move interceptors into position before a missile deploys its warheads or its decoys. “Space-based assets are the only thing that’s going to enable us to do that.”

Why the shift is possible now

Romo’s answer to why now started where every space conversation does. “Launch costs and access to space are dramatically different than they’ve ever been,” he said. The last time the country seriously discussed intercepting missiles from space was the 1980s, when reaching orbit cost a fortune. What would have been laughable a decade ago is ordinary today: a constellation of a thousand spacecraft in low Earth orbit was a pipe dream until Starlink and others made it routine. That maturity trickles down to the companies building the hardware. “I’m not doing this for the first time,” Romo said of the manufacturing base. “I’m doing it for the second or third time and scaling up.”

The case for maneuver

The deeper shift is doctrinal. The Pentagon’s strategy for low Earth orbit is proliferation: put up too many targets to take out. But proliferation has limits. “MEO and GEO are, literally, a million times bigger than LEO,” Romo said, and blanketing orbits that vast with enough satellites to cover every point at every moment is “completely untenable.” Most US investment has historically gone to those high-energy orbits, GPS in MEO, missile warning and secure communications in GEO, and those assets are now under pressure for the first time. If you cannot defend them with sheer numbers, you need assets that can move. He pointed to recent reports of three Russian craft maneuvering around a US imaging satellite over Ukraine as a sign that everything up there now has to be able to move.

Impulse is already flying the capability. Its Victus Surgo and Victus Salo vehicles, both Space Domain Awareness missions and both in the clean room now, are built for fast, high-energy repositioning, one bound for a geostationary transfer orbit and one for LEO. In December, with Starfish Space, the company completed a fully autonomous rendezvous in orbit, one vehicle approaching another on a single camera with no joystick. “The ability to reach out and touch an asset when it wants to be touched is one thing,” Romo said. “When it does not want to be touched is another.” None of it is easy. Closing velocities run to thousands of meters per second, and hitting a target, he said, is not so much “a bullet with a bullet” as “maybe 100 times harder than that.”

Urgency, meet affordability

Speed is only half the equation; the program has to be cheap enough to build at scale. A recent Congressional Budget Office estimate pegged space-based interceptors at roughly $22 million a shot. In historical context that is not outrageous, Romo noted, since ground-based interceptors like SM-3 and GBI run from $30 million to nearly $100 million. But multiply $22 million by the thousands of interceptors a real architecture would need and the number gets very large, very fast. Holmes was direct about the constraint: Gen. Guetlein, who leads the program, has said publicly that if space-based interceptors cannot be bought affordably and at scale, they will not be part of Golden Dome.

Her fix is procurement itself. Because this is net-new, the program can start from a clean sheet rather than fifty years of cost-plus habit. “We’re giving you prize-based competitions,” she said, rewarding demonstrated performance instead of paperwork, and dealing directly with builders to compress timelines. Romo was a fan: “You set an ambitious goal, and if you get it, you get paid a bunch. If you don’t, sorry.”

When the architect and the builder are in sync

The most useful stretch of the hour was watching the two roles meet. Streamlined requirements and prize-based awards, both agreed, are collapsing timelines that used to run for years. “We are fielding novel capabilities here,” Holmes said, “so we need to be in constant conversation around how you think about that deployment.” Part of that shift is away from purely kinetic defense. Increasingly the goal is to buy decision-makers time and hand them better options, with AI surfacing recommendations faster. “Strategic assets in space actually buy back time,” Holmes said.

Romo made the stakes concrete. Intercepting a missile in its boost phase means detecting a launch, relaying it, getting a human decision, and reaching the target, all inside a window measured in seconds, against something that may be accelerating through the atmosphere behind a wall of plasma. Persistent overhead coverage is the only way to compress that chain, which is itself the argument for a large, maneuverable fleet. Hypersonics, he added, are harder still, because they stay in the atmosphere and can bank and dive away from an interceptor. “These are hard problems,” as Holmes put it. “Very hard problems.”

Where the opportunity is

For the investors and founders in the room, Anderson asked the question the firm came for: between the architecture Holmes is defining and the vehicles Romo is building, where is the white space? The answer was a layered defense running from space to land to sea, and a long list of pieces still to be built: low-cost kinetic and non-kinetic interceptors, AI and autonomy for automated decision-making, track fusion, and low-latency communications to stitch it all together. Golden Dome’s “ecosystem hub,” Holmes said, is meant to be a single front door for companies to find where they fit, with primes subcontracting to non-traditionals inside its command-and-control consortium rather than the other way around.

Both closed on the same note: the moment is rare, and the hard part is endurance. “It’s a perfect storm, almost,” Holmes said, with capital markets, policy, and acquisition reform aligned at once. Romo’s caution was that the early demonstrations are not what pays off; long-term production is, and confidence in it “will ebb and flow with news cycles and OMB reports.” The work is to stay the course. “We’re swinging back pretty hard on manufacturing and building things again in America,” he said. Golden Dome is meant to field real capability by 2028. The signal to watch, both agreed, is not press releases but contract awards, test campaigns, and the steady expansion of the space budgets that quietly underwrite it.

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