On a slow day for Defense Department awards, Raytheon (RTN) made out pretty well on Thursday, scoring a pair of Pentagon contracts worth a combined $70.5 million.
The larger of the two awards, weighing in at a hefty $49.9 million, came in the form of a modification to a sole-source cost-plus-fixed-fee contract to perform engineering work on Standard Missile-3 Block IB -- its second such award in as many months. SM-3IB is the latest version of Raytheon's Standard surface-to-air missile and aims to enhance the original's effectiveness with enhanced, two-color infrared target seeking and the use of short bursts of precision propulsion to steer the missile toward incoming targets. The SM-3IB is expected to go into service in 2015, and Raytheon's work on the instant contract will be completed by Dec. 31, 2013.
Raytheon's other contract of the day, worth $20.6 million, was a modification to a previously awarded firm-fixed-price contract to procure tube-launched, optically tracked, wireless-guided missiles. To date, and counting this latest modification, this original contact has been modified so as to raise its cumulative value to nearly $203 million.
