President Donald Trump's plan for the Golden Dome missile shield has increased the focus on space defense. Laura Crabtree, former SpaceX engineer, joins Caroline Hyde and Ed Ludlow on "Bloomberg Tech."

Washington

The Golden Dome missile defense proposal, emphasized by the Trump administration, brings attention to the technical and organizational challenges of integrating government and commercial partners in space defense. Key risks include high costs, the need for extensive coordination, and the importance of strategic locations such as Greenland.

Industry experts highlight the significance of commercial partnerships, using SpaceX's collaboration with NASA as a model for rapid technological advancement and operational trust. While the Golden Dome remains in development, there is optimism that improved acquisition processes and strong partnerships will address previous obstacles, supporting broader access and innovation in the space sector.

Trump's Golden Dome puts focus on space defense

You've done such a deep dive on how technically difficult Golden Dome will be to execute from a partner perspective. Talk us through it Laura. Yes. So the biggest challenge I think is not necessarily going to be just the technology. It's going to be the cooperation between the government and the commercial partners that are providing solutions to the government. And that is everything from the technology the acquisition of programs the operations of those programs and then everything in between. And so I think not only the cost is a little bit of a risk but also the risk of the number of people that need to be involved in Golden Dome and the number of things that need to go correctly for the Golden Dome to be successful program. I mean aside from the fact of the geopolitics of it all as. Secretary Hicks said has been saying that Greenland is vital to U.S. plans to build the Golden Dome missile defense shield in particular. I'm I'm interested in ultimately whether you think it will get pulled off and in what succession. How is your software. How how are people thinking about aligning partners. Yeah. The one thing that I keep going back to is the demonstration of the commercial partnership in companies like SpaceX. The coordination with NASA the coordination with all of the different partnerships that SpaceX has formed over the lifecycle of the company and all the partnerships that are going to need to come from the Golden Dome. So I think looking at that and the technological challenges for that and the communication and coordination we've taken a look at how much we need to be able to provide our commercial partners to be able to work in concert with the government partnerships that they are forming in the future and in right now so that we can make sure that it is as successful as it can be. At this stage Laurie in a Golden Dome is is an idea or a proposal or plan for missile defense. But increasingly the focus of the administration that as we discussed at the top is space as either a war fighting domain or a critical domain to defense you know leveraging your experience at SpaceX. But currently what's your assessment of how this administration is going about that as a priority. Well I think from the discussions I've had the priority is on acquisition letting the commercial partners develop technology and then having the government acquire it. I think there's still some work to be done on acquisition of programs acquisition of technologies and then how the partnership actually works between them. And then I think there's probably some financial discussions that also need to be worked out a little bit. But there. Yeah you're right. It is still in development. So I think a lot of those things are in discussion and I'm very hopeful that some of the roadblocks that we've seen in the past to government acquisition will be removed going forward. I've got to ask you about a first ISS medical evacuation. No SpaceX at the heart of it. But NASA moved incredibly quickly again reflecting on your time in industry what you made of it. And you know we say on this program a lot. The ability to put humans into orbit and return them from ISS is now routine through SpaceX. Is that more evidence of that. It absolutely is. And the partnership that was formed when I started at SpaceX in 2009 I didn't it didn't start as it is right now. There were still open questions on whether or not SpaceX was going to come to the table with real hardware with real operational mindset. And we did prove to NASA that we were there to basically run a successful program. And over the course of the number of years that we've been working with them we've really built a level of trust with NASA such that they can move quickly. They can make decisions quickly. And I think part of that is the underlying software and infrastructure and decision making that has been sort of part of the program from the beginning. And that has enabled them to move quickly and deorbit a crew in a very short period of time. Something that is not easy. The technology is there. Clearly we have returned many humans from space at this point. However the decision usually is multiple weeks months. And you know if you have six months of planning you know what the weather is going to be. You know exactly who does what. You know the stowage. You know everything. But in order to move quickly you need to have all of that very well planned out. And I think that it is a really nice thing to see the the the movement in that. And now you've built Epsilon 3 and now your customers are not just NASA itself but other rival space companies. There's a worry that SpaceX is too dominant. Would you say it is. I would not say it is. I would say that we need companies like SpaceX to have a lot of success to show the market how impactful a very very large and successful space company can be. And it's also enabling a lot of other companies to get to space quickly and effectively and also at a at a cost that is much lower than previous. So it's actually enabling the rest of the space economy. And I'm really glad to see it. It's something that I wanted to be a part of from the beginning of my journey in this industry.

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