U.S. President Donald Trump's Golden Dome missile defense concept revives a controversial, decades-old initiative whose ambitious construction could upend norms in outer space and reshape relations between the world's top space powers.

The concept behind the missile defence system was that it would provide a way of effectively making nuclear weapons obsolete. Through the application of a defensive system that incorporated both land and space-based missiles, it was believed that any nuclear warhead fired would be destroyed before it was able to re-enter the Earth’s atmosphere.