The U.S. Air Force has awarded a pair of contracts worth approximately $900 million each to Lockheed Martin (NYSE: LMT) and Raytheon (NYSE: RTN) to conduct technology maturation and risk reduction work for the Long Range Standoff nuclear cruise missile.The companies will perform work at their respective facilities in Florida and Arizona through 2022 under the cost-plus-fixed-fee contracts, the Defense Department said Wednesday.
The LRSO program seeks to replace the AGM-86B air-launched cruise missile that has been in operations since the early 1980s and will be integrated with the military branch’s bomber fleet as part of the nuclear triad, the Air Force reported Wednesday.
The Air Force Nuclear Weapons Center will pick a single vendor for the LRSO engineering and manufacturing development, production and deployment stages upon the contracts’ completion with plans to field the new cruise missile by late 2020s.
The service branch awarded the contracts a year after it requested proposals for the LRSO program.
