What if a satellite constellation could track incoming missiles and then select one satellite to drop from orbit to take down the incoming threat?

That’s Booz Allen Hamilton’s vision for Brilliant Swarm, a rebooted idea from President Ronald Reagan’s administration that was known at the time as Brilliant Pebbles.

Chris Bogdan, an executive vice president for the company, explained the concept during a media presentation this week, saying that each of the satellites in a constellation of up to 2,000 could function as a communications node, a tracker, a seeker and then would become the hit-to-kill vehicle.

“It’s like a bullet in space,” said Bogdan, who is based in Colorado Springs. In this case, the bullet would be the size of a small refrigerator.

The company pitched Brilliant Swarm as a component of Golden Dome, a vision outlined in a presidential executive order to invest heavily in ballistic, cruise and hypersonic missile defense.

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The order issued by President Donald Trump in January called for an Iron Dome, referencing Israel’s missile defense in place. But it’s since been rebranded as Golden Dome.

The plans for the dome were due on Friday, but Defense One reported the documents will likely be submitted this coming week, citing anonymous sources.

Right now, the U.S. relies in part on 44 ground-based missile interceptors in Alaska and California. The interceptors can bring down a ballistic missile in flight, similar to a bullet hitting a bullet, said Trey Obering, a senior executive at Booz Allen Hamilton. He was previously the director of the Missile Defense Agency. But these missile interceptors do not address threats from Russia or China, he said.

The proposed solution would build on the peer-to-peer networking demonstrated when the Ukrainian Army built a system based on Uber’s ride sharing network, Bogdan said.

“When a Russian tank appeared, someone with the application could take a photo of the tank and then provide the coordinates of that tank into the network,” he said. “Then the software algorithm within the system determined which artillery battery or missile unit was best positioned to fire on that tank, much like the Uber system, which figures out which drivers are in (the) best position to pick up a passenger.”

The system cut the Ukrainian Army’s response time from 30 to 40 minutes down to less than a minute, he said.

The proposed satellite constellation would track missiles autonomously as well and select amongst themselves the best satellites to hit the missile, Bogdan said.

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The company modeled intercepting a single North Korean missile with 1,000 satellites and found it would have 14 different opportunities to take down that missile within the first 15 minutes of flight, he said, long before ground-based interceptors would see the missile.

Obering cautioned it would not be able to protect the U.S. from everything that Russia and China could launch, but it would intercept a substantial number of their missiles.

“It would place a big question mark in their mind as to whether their attack would be successful,” he said.

The constellation could be made possible by the falling cost of both satellites and launching them into orbit. The lower costs are major advancements since the original concept was floated in the 1980s, Bogdan said. In addition, the technology to make the satellites communicate in orbit did not exist during the Reagan administration.

Obering said a single ground-based midcourse interceptor currently costs about $60 to $90 million. It would cost about $70 million to put 100 satellites into orbit.

The constellation the company is proposing would compliment, rather than replicate the constellations the Space Development Agency is currently funding, Bogdan said.

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Colorado-based companies such as Lockheed Martin in Littleton and Sierra Space in Louisville are under contract to build missile warning and missile tracking satellites for the agency, according to a 2024 news release.

Booz Allen Hamilton would not build the satellites for this concept, they would provide the technical expertise for the project, Obering said.