Wild Startup Idea - Ballistic Missile Defense
Not-Getting-Nuked as a Service.
The US dropped the ball strategically after the Cold War ended. Basically, the country didn’t formulate a new strategy and has been meandering with knee-jerk responses from crisis to crisis.
In September 2000, The Project for the New American Century, a neocon think tank, published a paper arguing that it’s about time for America to formulate a new military strategy, increase defense spending, and make better choices - like killing the Joint Strike Fighter program in favor of developing technologies we’ll actually need. The paper is worth reading, or at least skimming - it gets a lot of things right.1
Now, shortly after, 9/11 happened, defense spending did rise, but better strategic choices were not made. The War on Terror dominated conversations about security, and nobody wanted to talk about serious strategic competition with our rivals.
Since then:
Russia has transitioned from a nascent democracy to a belligerent totalitarian state with a severe dislike for the US.
China has rebranded itself from a country integrating itself into a US-led world order to our main superpower rival.
North Korea has graduated from a psycho-cult of a state to a psycho-cult of a state with nukes and ICBMs.
It’s about time for the US to get serious about strategy again.
The worst decision made by America post-Cold War, according to Rebuilding American Defenses was shutting down the Brilliant Pebbles program. Brilliant Pebbles was a global ballistic missile defense program first proposed by Lowell Wood and Edward Teller2. Here’s how it was supposed to work:
The US would launch many autonomous satellites (Pebbles!) into Lower Earth Orbit. They would detect ballistic missile launches and launch themselves at the missiles, attempting to hit them early in the boost stage and destroy them just by the force of impact. Here’s what the satellites would look like:
Now, most of this is a life jacket - designed for protection against laser strikes and such. The core part of each Pebble would look like this:
It’s basically a propellant tank, some sensors to track the missile, and a processor to run the whole thing. Even in the late 80s, this was mostly off-the-shelf technology.
The number of Pebbles you’d need in orbit varies depending on your goals and their exact specifications, but the highest estimate for truly global protection against ballistic missile launches is 100,000 pebbles. There are useful versions of the program that require fewer Pebbles (even 1000 works if your goal is local protection)3.
This is… A great design. It offers many advantages like:
Missiles are easiest to hit during the boost stage. They are easily seen (as they burn fuel), and their maneuverability is limited.
A swarm of autonomous Pebbles means there is no command center that can be taken out with a first strike.
Pebbles can hit their targets from great distances because their relative velocity is so high.
But their main advantage is that they are cheap. They fit the Nitze criteria, from Wikipedia:
Nitze stated that if a BMD system were to be successful in fulfilling this role, it needed to meet three criteria.[1]
The first two criteria are simple: the proposed system has to actually work, and it has to be able to survive attacks against it. While these may seem obvious, many earlier systems failed one or the other of these criteria. For example, Nike Zeus was highly vulnerable to attacks by the very ICBMs it was supposed to defend against,[2] while the later Spartan missile left many questions about its ability to actually destroy its targets at reasonable range.[3]
The third criterion, the one the criteria is really known for, is that the system must be "cost effective at the margin".[1] This is essentially a common-sense rewording of the earlier concept of the cost-exchange ratio, the amount of money needed to counteract a dollar of offensive capability. Previous BMD systems had always been far more expensive than the missiles they were designed to shoot down; during the Nike-X program in the 1960s it was estimated that every dollar the Soviets spent on new ICBMs would require $20 of spending to counter it, a 20-to-1 ratio.[4]
The Nitze criteria were peak Cold War theorycrafting, gotta love it4. Anyway, Brilliant Pebbles was the best plan for a global ballistic missile defense ever to exist. If you’d like to read more about the concept and rationale - there’s this deck from Lowell Wood, one of the program’s creators
The program was in development in the late 80s/early 90s and funding was allocated to build it. Plenty of theoretical studies have concluded the program’s feasibility. The program got to the stage of testing but experienced REALLY bad luck - it suffered three failures in its tests for reasons unrelated to the core program - booster failure, etc.
Then, Brilliant Pebbles was savagely murdered by Sam Nunn5 and others in 1992-1993. Their arguments were roughly as follows:
The program is expensive.
It might take 10 years.
Nukes aren’t really a problem anymore.
However, the key argument was that it would violate the ABM treaty. That’s REALLY what killed the program, and goddamn, does this look dumb in retrospect. The ABM treaty was a treaty between the USA and the USSR to limit the development of their ballistic missile defense systems signed in 1972. Now, in 1972 it made some sense - it would de-escalate tensions and stop the arms race. But by 1992, one of the signatories had ceased to exist. Russia had bigger problems than ballistic missile defense and besides, there were even conversations with Yeltsin about including Russia in the envelope of protection offered by Brilliant Pebbles. But Sam Nunn and his allies didn’t see it that way. They thought we’d magically get to a world without nukes, and so, Brilliant Pebbles was a waste. So they used the ABM treaty as a reason to kill the program. Funnily enough, the ABM treaty was re-signed with post-Soviet countries in 1997, and then the US withdrew from it in 2002. If you want to read the full history of Brilliant Pebbles and its demise, you can do so here6:
So, Brilliant Pebbles died, many moons have passed, and some things have changed since. Most importantly, everything involved in making Pebbles got cheap and available to private companies.
If you think about the design, your top costs are:
Getting stuff into space.
Sensors (notably LiDAR).
Processors.
Now, let’s look at what happened to the price of these things. The cost of getting stuff into space has fallen ~10X:
LiDAR prices have fallen by ~100X since the early 2000s. I don’t have data going back to the 80s but it’s safe to say that LiDAR was very expensive and got very cheap. LiDAR also got much, much better.
Computation got ridiculously cheap:
I don’t have the exact specs, but my best guess is that a Brilliant Pebble could cost on the order of magnitude of $20,000 today - $10,000 launch cost, $3,000 sensors, $1,000 compute, $1,000 solar panels/batteries, etc. That would mean that the cost of materials for global protection against ballistic missiles is… $2 billion. That is peanuts, really. Defense spending in 2023 is going to be over $800 billion. You could sneak in global protection against getting nuked in there and nobody would notice.
But, as it stands today, the live players are largely outside of the government and in tech businesses. But here’s the thing, building Brilliant Pebbles is A LOT like building a tech startup.
You launch cheap satellites into space like Planet Labs or Varda.
You make a LiDAR-based guidance system like Waymo or Cruise.
You write some distributed autonomous decision-making code, which every top nerd in the country would LOVE to do.
The weird thing about starting a Brilliant Pebbles startup (let’s call it Marbles) is that you’re building something for the government that the government hasn’t allocated the money for yet. But, at the same time, by building the thing, you are increasing the odds that the government will pay for it. If you show a successful interception, and you say how cheap it is, and the theoretical studies were already done in the 1980s - it gets to be a really easy sell. Moreover, you only have to sell the program once. You can pick your time and do it right after North Korea runs a successful test, or Russia/China invades someone, etc. It’s much easier to pass a law when you have a solution on the table, it’s not super expensive, and there’s media cycle urgency around it.
Now, let’s run some numbers to see if the math works:
Let’s say that the all-in program cost is ~$5B (the older estimates put it at ~$50B but we have seen massive price drops). For a project like this, the government will generally allow contractors to make a ~10% margin. So your net profit is expected to be conservatively at ~$500M. What would it cost to run a successful interception test? Hard to say, but Varda has achieved launching a factory into space with $50M in funding. Seems like a similar level of difficulty milestone. So if investors invest $50M, and own half the company, they could make $250M. Not bad, but not quite what VCs are looking for. That being said, the $5B estimate is the lowest-cost possible estimate. If you demonstrate the technology, and the government allocates the money, you can sell the company at that stage to a defense prime contractor, and they will make sure to balloon the project to $10B and earn twice as much. That means, that they’d be willing to pay closer to $1B for the company. That gets into venture-like returns territory. This is all napkin math, of course, you’d want to look at discount rates, maintenance contracts for the long term, etc.
Now, there are certain legal/political (the two are inseparable in this case) risks when it comes to starting a private ballistic missile defense company. The good news is that you don’t really require any controlled materials for testing - you can just build the thing and do it. Even so, anybody who develops such technology in the US is likely to attract attention from the Feds. You’d want to pick investors who can provide you the greatest political cover - like Josh Wolfe who’s testifying before Congress, Katherine Boyle whose sole investment focus is American Dynamism, the Founder’s Fund which has its own Senator, etc.
That said… It’d help if you are politically connected and completely clean from a National Security perspective. That’s why I can’t do it myself - in no world will anyone in the NatSec apparatus think that it’s OK for a Russian/American dual citizen to build ballistic missile defense system prototypes in a warehouse in LA. I was recently told a story about how a Russian immigrant tried building a space company with some limited dual-use applications in the US and was told to sell his stake for peanuts very, very quickly. Ballistic missile defense is a touch more serious than that.
As for the precise laws you’d have to skirt - I’m not a lawyer, IDK, but I can’t see anything super illegal in the early R&D program. You’re a satellite research startup!
Now, there is another advantage to doing ballistic missile defense privately. It helps from a game theoretic perspective. If the US runs a government program to build a global BMD program, it might invite preemptive actions from Russia/China etc. But if as much as possible is done privately, it shortens the time our adversaries have to do anything about it. Ideally, with a program like this, you want the government to announce it and launch the first batch on the same day.
My favorite thing about startups is they can reinvent the rules. Most startups don’t do that, most startups try to follow a playbook, but the great ones change the name of the game. OpenAI did that with its weird investment structure. Anduril did that by starting a defense prime from nothing. Marbles can do that too, and perhaps have more impact than either. After all, what startup has a greater potential to literally save the world?
I hope they got the ethnic bioweapon part wrong but who knows.
!!!
The local version of the program was called Global PALS.
Note that the third criterion is mostly important in great power competition and less so when building protection from rogue states with nukes - the US could outspend North Korea 20-to-1 and not blink an eye. But this isn’t super relevant to the post, the Nitze criteria are still good.
A former US Senator turned Theranos advisor.
There’s also a discussion of an improved design that can do both boost stage and mid-stage interception if you want to get into the weeds.
Forgot to mention - from an IP perspective - Lowell Wood now works for an IP focused firm, Intellectual Ventures, so you know where to go.
So these sattelites somehow detect a launch reliably? How? You don't want them attacking a sudden fire and cause another Beirut explosion. a neutal network? Then you need lots of data, that doesn't exist.
Even if you manage to detect those launches, re-entering the atmosphere fast enough to hit the target seems very challenging. I intuitively I wouldn't think the detecting sattelite could be the same as the impacting one