THREE BUDGET LINES, ONE BOTTLENECK

The interceptor awards, structured under OTA to fund competing prototypes rather than an immediate down-select, run alongside a $17.5 billion FY2027 Golden Dome request, of which only $398 million sits in the base budget. The 25 additional high-energy launch missions were described as emergent requirements not anticipated when Lane 2 contracts were awarded last April, and they would land on Vulcan and Falcon Heavy at the same moment Vulcan remains constrained by a solid-rocket-booster anomaly investigation. The shipyard study, included in the FY2027 budget at OMB direction after the Constellation-class cancellation, would require a presidential national-security waiver under 10 U.S.C. 8679 before major hull components could be built in foreign yards. Throughput is the binding constraint. Watch where the FY2027 reconciliation language lands on workforce and supplier funding, which of the 12 SBI vendors actually book launches against an already saturated NSSL manifest, and whether the foreign-yard waiver moves to the President’s desk. The architecture is funded. The yards are not.