Kratos wins $446 million Space Force contract for missile-tracking ground systems

Kratos Defense & Security Solutions has won a 446.8 million dollar Space Force contract for the ground systems that will operate a new constellation of missile-warning satellites in medium Earth orbit. The award, announced March 19, comes two weeks after the Space Force completed a preliminary design review for the same constellation's second phase — and it positions Kratos as the ground infrastructure provider for a program that is now fully part of the Golden Dome architecture the Trump administration has made a signature national security initiative.

The Resilient Missile Warning and Tracking program is being built in phases called epochs. Epoch 1 consists of 12 satellites built by Millennium Space Systems, a Boeing subsidiary, currently in production. Epoch 2 — 10 satellites from BAE Systems under a 1.2 billion dollar contract awarded last year — just cleared its preliminary design review on March 11, the Space Force announced. Launches for both epochs are expected before the end of the decade.

Kratos will provide the ground segment: the systems for sending commands to the satellites, receiving sensor data, processing that data, and delivering it to military operators. That is the piece that makes the constellation usable in the field — and it is the piece the Space Force has been explicit about wanting to modernize faster than the satellite bus itself. According to Air and Space Forces Magazine, the ground segment is poised to receive around 350 million dollars in fiscal year 2026 alone.

The medium Earth orbit location is deliberate. MEO sits between geosynchronous orbit — where traditional early-warning satellites have operated for decades, providing wide coverage but fixed viewing angles — and low Earth orbit, where newer tracking constellations offer better resolution on dim, maneuvering targets like hypersonic glide vehicles but cover less area per satellite. MEO offers a middle ground: wider coverage than LEO, better viewing angles for tracking objects through the upper atmosphere than GEO.

The constellation feeds into the Golden Dome architecture. President Trump announced the Golden Dome in May 2025 — a sprawling, all-domain missile defense network that would integrate sensors and interceptors across space, air, and ground. The MEO missile-warning constellation is expected to be interoperable with the Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture that the Space Development Agency is building in LEO, which in turn feeds into the broader missile defense architecture.

Kratos has been building toward this position. In November 2024, the company won a 116.7 million dollar Space Development Agency contract to develop and operate a ground system for a separate constellation of missile-defense satellites in LEO. That means the same company is building the ground segment for both the LEO and MEO layers of the proliferated missile-warning architecture — a concentration of ground system work that reflects Kratos's specialization in software-defined satellite operations infrastructure.

The pace of the Epoch program has not been without friction. The Epoch 2 contract was previously delayed due to budget uncertainties following a continuing resolution passed in 2024. The incremental epoch approach — delivering improved tranches every two to three years — is designed to reduce the risk of large program failures by building capability in stages. The ground system Kratos is building is explicitly architected to absorb new satellite increments as they come online.

For the defense technology ecosystem, the contract is notable for what it reveals about the software-defined ground segment trend. Kratos is not building custom hardware for each constellation — it is providing a software platform that can operate across multiple orbital regimes and multiple satellite buses. That is the business model that won it both the LEO and MEO ground system work.