Two hundred and eighty-six days into its mission, the Mars Surveyor ’98 began its orbital insertion maneuver — and 20 minutes later the spacecraft was permanently lost. When the Mishap Investigation Board released its Phase I report on Nov. 10, 1999, it determined the cause of failure was that one piece of ground software calculated the trajectory in imperial units and another produced results in metric units. Ultimately the $327 million loss of the instrument was blamed on lack of sufficient rigorous end-to-end (E2E) systems testing, including across both hardware and software elements.
President Donald Trump’s initiative to protect the homeland from missile attacks, the Golden Dome for America, is now underway. Initial funding was secured in the reconciliation bill, and industry will soon be unleashed to contribute to the project. The technical challenges associated with implementing Golden Dome, however, will be significant. The effort will require integrating disparate systems across vast distances and different domains — from space-based sensors to ground-based interceptors.
Among many other challenges, rigorous and calibrated E2E testing is an essential but underappreciated component to ensure the Golden Dome functions at the highest possible level, and on time. E2E testing is going to be essential to putting in place a system that can deny our adversaries of coercive first strikes and fully leverage our strategic deterrent — without ending up with the kind of basic math failures that doomed the Mars Surveyor project.
E2E testing involves leveraging novel testing methods for both hardware and software and simulating diverse, realistic scenarios, such as detecting and tracking various missile threats in space with real targets, including ballistic and hypersonic missile surrogates; coordinating diverse space and terrestrial interceptor employment; evaluating shot doctrine; and assessing system performance. The system’s susceptibility to cyberattacks and the need for robust interoperability and communication among diverse components add further layers of complexity.
Testing commercially developed defense products and services are often perceived as speedbumps on the road to deployment, but they are truly essential parts of systems-of-systems engineering, ensuring that the capabilities delivered to our military can be used in the way intended on a battlefield or when asked to defend the homeland.
As an initiative, Golden Dome for America remains both ambitious and ambiguous. For an initial deployment target of 2028, rigorous testing must be engineered into the system-of-systems architecture from the very beginning. Testing must be conducted across each platform, traversing multiple domains, and must include both hardware and software. The Senate and House have noted the importance of a “robust testing regime” to include “execution of end-to-end detection, tracking and destruction techniques that exercise multiple components of the Golden Dome System.”
The dynamic US industrial base may provide part of the answer in three ways.
Exploit Existing Commercial Capabilities
Over the past few years, commercial companies have developed multiple and novel testbeds for ballistic and hypersonic reentry programs. The testing ecosystem now includes representation from large primes to innovative Silicon Beach start-ups that are increasing the capacity and capability of hypersonic and reentry testing.
Better leveraging this ecosystem, perhaps with some slight modifications, could significantly reduce the costs associated with traditional flight-testing methods, enabling more frequent and iterative testing. One such opportunity would be to have on-orbit Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture (PWSA) Transport Layer satellites observe the frequent commercial hypersonic reentries happening now, and more frequently with the government’s Multi-Service Advanced Capability Hypersonics Test Bed (MACH-TB) program.
Incentivize Investment In Test Facilities
There is notable growth in the ability to digitally twin, model, orchestrate, and optimize space-based sensing assets autonomously. In the case of space, the nation is seeing novel launch providers and commercial hypersonic reentry providers that could be leveraged for testing.
As the lead engineering and test arm for Golden Dome, the Missile Defense Agency can bring together new facilities and significant test capabilities. The Pentagon could, through earlier and broader investment, incentivize companies to build more hypersonic and space testing facilities and make them available for broad use in support of Golden Dome testing requirements early in the systems engineering process.
Include Commercial Companies into the Integrated Test Campaign
Every component across the Golden Dome kill web will need to be tested in some capacity. An integrated master test plan must account for sensor level tests that ensure space sensor passive angle tracking and optical communications terminals are capable of sensing an incoming weapon and passing that track data to a weapon system. It must also allow for on-orbit testing, associated command and control testing, and ultimately for testing in operationally relevant scenarios to validate the E2E kill web.
One way to do meet those objectives is to involve Golden Dome industry partners in the development of the integrated master test plan from the very beginning. This could help to identify faults earlier, facilitate remediation of those faults early and often, and accelerate more rapid testing events. While aberrant from how test campaigns are currently developed in the DoD, it would arguably align with the need for deployment speed articulated from the president in authorizing Golden Dome for America.
Testing has long earned the ire of the services, and perhaps rightly so. Nonetheless it is a necessary part of systems development — and on a system as complex as Golden Dome for America, we should be leveraging industry’s aligned investments to ensure both speed and specifications are met.
The Trump White House, Department of Defense, and Congress have all rightly driven innovation and commercialization of defense technology while rebuilding the antiquated and increasingly irrelevant defense acquisition system. Nevertheless, production speed alone will not be a sufficient metric to ensure the successful operational deployment of a complex multi-domain, multi-service, and multi-effector layered missile defense system. To deploy Golden Dome on schedule, it must be rigorously tested.
Sarah Mineiro was the staff director of the Strategic Forces Subcommittee on the House Armed Services Committee for the House Republicans and is now a non-resident Senior Associate with CSIS Aerospace Security Project.
PHOTOS: AFA 2025
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