Kratos, a San Diego-based company with a significant presence in El Paso County, was awarded a contract worth nearly half a billion dollars last week.

The contract, worth up to $446.8 million, will require Kratos to design, integrate and sustain ground systems the Space Force will need to operate a constellation of satellites intended to detect and track hypersonic missiles. This contract comes nearly a year after Space Systems Command, charged with purchasing technology for the Space Force, awarded $1.2 billion to another defense company to build the satellites.

Kratos’ facility in the area in on Academy Ridge View, just south of the Polaris Pointe development.

Kratos, along with several other companies, including Colorado Springs-based Auria, will bring together many existing systems and unify them into a single cohesive unit. Kratos employs 536 people in El Paso Coiunty, company staff said last week.

The contract is part of the Space Force’s Resilient Missile Warning and Tracking (MWT) program. In a news release, Kratos said it will provide a “resilient ground architecture” and help the Space Force meet “current operational requirements,” while preparing the nation for future threats.

“Programs like Resilient MWT require more than individual technologies. They require the engineering depth and operational experience to deliver integrated mission systems,” said Phil Carrai, president of Kratos Space, Training and Cyber Division. “Kratos has extensive experience engineering, integrating and sustaining resilient ground architectures for critical space and communications missions.”

Auria specializes in software development, systems engineering and cybersecurity. One of its specialties is the Battlespace Operational Readiness Game (BORG), which it uses to simulate satellite operations training. The BORG system will not be used for this project, Auria’s President Tom Dickson said Tuesday.

Dickson was not able to provide many specific details due to the nature of the contract and Auria’s role as a subcontractor.

In a social media post, the company said it will develop, deploy and sustain the “secure mission management solution.” Dickson said this means Auria will be responsible for tasking missile warning and missile tracking satellites.

“(Auria will manage) all the resources (space and ground) to create the most optimal assignments in a very complex environment,” he said. As part of the project, Auria expects to bring on about 20 engineers by the peak of the program, Dickson said.

The company is proud of its role during this contract, with Dickson saying the mission is incredibly important. A focus of the mission is, according to the social media post, detecting, tracking and custody of all types of missiles, including maneuverable hypersonics.

A traditional ballistic missile travels like a cannonball with a fixed trajectory making it easy to guess where it’s going to land, Iain Boyd, the director of the Center for National Security Initiatives at the University of Colorado Boulder, told the Gazette last year.

A modern hypersonic missile travels five times faster, glides from side to side and travels lower in the atmosphere, outside the traditional altitudes where the U.S. monitors for threats.

“You’ll lose it, if you don’t track it all the time,” Boyd said.