Military
Lockheed Martin Defeats Raytheon to Win $915 Million Air Force Space Fence Contract
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The Department of Defense awarded eight defense contracts in its Monday evening announcement of contract awards. The total value of contracts awarded was $1.34 billion, but just one company captured more than two-thirds of the money: Lockheed Martin (NYSE: LMT).
Lockheed Martin’s award, a $914.7 million contract, hires the company to perform engineering, manufacturing and development, production and deployment work for the U.S. Air Force’s Space Fence program. Over the next 52 months, Lockheed Martin will work to erect a system of sensors stretching from Moorestown, N.J., to Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands. Once operational, their mission will be to track and categorize upward of 500,000 pieces of so-called space junk orbiting the Earth, debris including everything from jettisoned pieces of satellite launch rockets to busted up scraps of Chinese satellite left over from that country’s demonstration of its anti-satellite missile prowess in 2007. Traveling at speeds in excess of 22,000 mph, even microscopic pieces of such junk pose a danger to orbiting satellites. Current technology, however, is only capable of detecting the largest hunks of junk — about 5% of the debris in orbit.
Lockheed’s win spells defeat for rival Raytheon (NYSE: RTN), which had been bidding against Lockheed Martin for the Space Fence contract.
Among the other contracts announced Monday:
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