WASHINGTON — The Missile Defense Agency today announced it has tapped hundreds of companies to supply tech for the Golden Dome initiative, though only those who receive orders later will get a piece of a prize pool worth up to $151 billion.
“This contract encompasses a broad range of work areas that allows for the rapid delivery of innovative capabilities to the warfighter with increased speed and agility, leveraging artificial intelligence and machine learning enabled applications where pertinent, and maximizing use of digital engineering, open systems architectures, model-based systems engineering, and agile processes in the acquisition, development, and sustainment of these capabilities,” MDA wrote in the contract announcement this evening.
After receiving 2,463 offers for the “first phase” of the Scalable Homeland Innovative Enterprise Layered Defense (SHIELD) contracting vehicle, the agency named 1,014 “qualifying offerors” eligible for staggered awards to be doled out via separate orders. The list of awardees was posted on the federal contracting website SAM.gov.
Just days after taking the oath of office for a second time, President Donald Trump inked an executive order calling for a sprawling, multilayered homeland air defense system, including a requirement for the development of space-based interceptors. That effort was later rebranded as Golden Dome and handed over to Space Force Gen. Michael Guetlein to manage.
In September Guetlein delivered his envisioned architecture for Golden Dome to Pentagon leadership, and the next step was inking out an implementation plan that was first expected to be first signed off by Deputy Secretary of Defense Steve Feinberg before making its way to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s desk.
At a cabinet meeting at the White House today, Hegseth mentioned he had reviewed Golden Dome plans but did not disclose if he had signed off on an implementation plan.
In the meantime, though, MDA has been working to get industry on board and issued a public presolicitation notice for SHIELD in late July. It then summoned interested parties to Huntsville, Ala. in early August to outline new details about the ambitions of Golden Dome and the contracting vehicle.
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According to presentation slides obtained by Breaking Defense, SHIELD was billed at that event as a “versatile MDA vehicle” envisioned to span 10 years and allow DoD entities to rapidly issue orders under one enterprise flexible arrangement.
“Scope encompasses a wide range of works areas (19+),” said one slide marked “approved for public release.” While it did not provide a complete list of contract opportunities, it noted broader areas like prototyping, weapon design, cybersecurity, systems engineering and data mining.
Meanwhile, just last week news broke that Space Force has made a first set of awards for prototypes for space-based interceptors (SBIs) meant to shoot down incoming enemy missiles in their boost phase just minutes after launch — but the winners of the initial, relatively small contracts are shrouded in secrecy.
Theresa Hitchens contributed to this report.
UPDATED 12/3/2025 at 3:25pm ET to add a reference to the public list of awardees.