President Donald Trump will announce at the Pentagon on Jan. 17 an ambitious new missile defense strategy that will aim to develop space-based sensors to detect enemy missiles and Star-Wars style orbital weaponry to shoot them down.
“Space, I think, is the key to the next step of missile defense,” a senior Trump administration official told reporters in a background call previewing the president’s announcement. “A space-based layer of sensors is something we are looking at to help get early warning and tracking and discrimination of missiles when they are launched.”
