Tech's golden opportunity in the shape of a figurative dome.

From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech.

I'm Novosafo.

There's a race going on among tech firms big and small to join in the construction of what President Trump has dubbed the Golden Dome, a missile defense system similar to Israel's Iron Dome.

Tens of billions of dollars in military contracts are at stake.

In fact, the total cost might be in the trillions.

And the project could stretch a decade.

The technology and scale needed to make this all happen is so far largely unproven,

and a whole host of tech firms are trying to show that they can help with the very complex

undertaking.

We spoke with Shira Frankel, a reporter at the New York Times, about some of the tech that

would make this whole system work.

Part of this, I think, is easy to imagine. Part of this would just involve things like batteries at various places along the borders of the United States that would... You're talking about missile batteries. Missile batteries, exactly. And they would shoot down. Like, you know, you can picture a rocket kind of trying to enter U.S. airspace, and it would shoot it down at very low levels. And if anyone is familiar with the system that Israel has put in place on its territory,

it would be quite similar. What's very different about this and the part of it that kind of feels

like sci-fi is intercepting what's called ICBMs or intercontinental ballistic missiles.

These are the types of weapons that the U.S.,

China and Russia have been building for decades. They are very, very fast, sometimes with nuclear

warheads, and they go out into outer space before hitting their intended targets. And if you

want to intercept something that's going out into outer space and moving, you know,

at incredible, incredible speeds, then you need to do it into outer space and moving, you know, at incredible,

incredible speeds, then you need to do it from outer space. And so this part of it involves

building a system that would work in space, that would intercept a missile moving faster than,

...