Donning his iconic-yet-casual Hawaiian button-down shirt, Anduril founder Palmer Luckey is visibly excited about America’s technology and defense future.
In an exclusive interview on “Mornings with Maria” Tuesday, Luckey applauded both public and private sector funding for initiatives like President Donald Trump’s Golden Dome and space intelligence.
“I think it’s encouraged spending on new national security priorities, ones that we probably should have been prioritizing a long time ago,” Luckey told FOX Business’ Maria Bartiromo.
“That’s where we need to be looking forward to,” he added. “And I think it is going to look pretty ‘Star Trek.’”
SPACEX AND ITS PARTNERS EMERGE AS FRONTRUNNERS TO BUILD PART OF TRUMP’S GOLDEN DOME PROJECT: REPORT
Luckey – who founded Anduril Industries in 2017 to radically transform U.S. defense technology – reacted positively to President Trump’s plan for the Golden Dome missile defense system that aims to block a variety of threats posed by China and Russia.
Trump said last month that the total cost of the project will be $175 billion and that Republicans’ reconciliation package for tax-cut legislation will also include $25 billion in spending to start construction on the Golden Dome.
“A lot of what you’re seeing with Golden Dome goes back to the Reagan [era] with trying to build the Star Wars Defense Initiative type of technologies,” Luckey explained, “the idea of really being able to protect the homeland from missile attacks, from aircraft attacks, from drone attacks.”
“The technology makes it much more feasible than it was decades ago. And so, I’m seeing not just more spending on the government side, I am already seeing a lot more spending on the private side,” he continued.
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) updated a previous analysis of space-based interceptors (SBI) against threats from regional powers, such as North Korea, to review the impact of lower launch costs on such systems. It found that the lowest-cost alternative would be about $161 billion, while the highest-cost alternative would be $542 billion.
“I don’t think that the Golden Dome is going to be as expensive as people think that it is,” Luckey countered. “And I think that it’s going to be much more effective than the critics would have you believe.”
According to the defense innovator, “nothing’s changed since Star Trek,” and “space is still the final frontier.”
“It is where a lot of the battles of the future are going to start… I strongly believe that the Republican Party, in particular, needs to have a very clear vision for what our space-based military capabilities look like, not next year, but 20 years from now, 50 years from now, 100 years from now,” Luckey said.
“We need to protect freedom of navigation in space, freedom of communication in space… More or less doing exactly what the United States Navy does on Earth, but in a growing space economy.”
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FOX Business’ Eric Revell contributed to this report.
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