The U.S. Department of Defense awarded two new contracts related to missile defense Wednesday, to two separate contractors, and on two separate continents.
The larger of the two awards, and by a few orders of magnitude, went to government contractor KBR (KBR 2.22%), which won a firm-fixed-price, option-filled contract valued at up to $134.2 million to develop and construct a land-based missile defense system to be built in Deveselu, Romania. According to Time magazine, the missile base will be constructed on 430 acres of property located -- and we quote -- "125 miles southwest of Count Dracula's castle."
Once complete, the base is expected to be equipped with as many as two dozen Raytheon (RTN) Standard Missile-3 interceptor rockets, and will become part of the Aegis Ashore Missile Defense System (AAMDS), a Lockheed Martin (LMT 0.74%) project designed to convert the Aegis air defense system into a defense against intercontinental ballistic missiles.
Speaking of Lockheed Martin, it was actually the recipient of the second missile defense contract awarded today. This one, for $12 million, will pay Lockheed Martin's Information Systems & Global Services division to support critical mission operations at the North America Aerospace Defense Command, or NORAD, Cheyenne Mountain Complex.
NORAD is in the process of "incrementally transition[ing] away" from its Cold War-era legacy space situational awareness mission. Lockheed Martin's role in this contract will be to help NORAD take the next step toward building a high-performance, sustainable, and network-centric computing platform for monitoring objects in space. Lockheed Martin is expected to complete work on this contract by Jan. 9, 2015.
