The $7.5M is almost beside the point. What matters is that the Department of the Air Force issued a sole-source award to Inversion Space Co. for development, testing, and demonstration of a re-entry vehicle called Arc, covering both in-space operations and point-to-point transport. The $19M ceiling is the real number to track. That's the upper bound on what the Air Force can route to Inversion without opening a new competition, and it suggests the program office expects this work to grow.
Space
Gravitics is getting $6.6 million from the Air Force to design, build, integrate, and fly a minimum viable product delivery rocket for its Orbital Carrier concept, sole-sourced, no competition. The scope is specific: demonstrate the carrier, deploy an unclassified mission vehicle to a target orbit. That is a full prototype flight on a direct award to a four-year-old company whose first product was a commercial space station module.1 Worth understanding how it got here.
Continue reading3 sources1 contract C4ISR / Comms
AeroVironment's $117.3M P550 contract is a production milestone, not a surprise. The Army delivered its first P550 to a Transformation in Contact brigade in August 2025, and this award formalizes the shift from evaluation buys to volume production.1 AeroVironment pitched the P550 for the Long Range Reconnaissance competition in late 2024, emphasizing all-electric VTOL and tool-free conversion from ISR to strike.3 The company has been delivering small UAS to the Army for over a decade—Raven, Puma, Switchblade—and the P550 extends that franchise into the brigade-level, long-endurance ISR layer the service has been trying to field since 2024.2
Continue reading5 sources1 contract AI / ML
Hadrian Automation won a $39.2M production contract from the Army in March, awarded under full and open competition with exactly one offer received.1 That single-bidder outcome tells you something about the market for software-driven, robotics-heavy manufacturing lines that can be dropped into defense programs. The Army opened the competition, Hadrian was apparently the only qualified respondent, and the contract moved forward. The company now has a production relationship, not just pilot funding or modernization dollars.
Continue reading4 sources1 contract Space
The Air Force awarded Accion Inc., doing business as Revolution Space, a $19.98M sole-source prototype contract to build a propulsive adaptor with integrated navigation that promises twice the thrust of existing Hall thrusters at equivalent power.1 The contract targets delivery by July 2027. The problem is that every public trace of Accion points to a different technology entirely.
Continue reading9 sources1 contract AI / ML/Landmark
The Army just handed Anduril a $20 billion contract ceiling to consolidate mission and operational data fusion into Lattice, its proprietary AI-enabled command-and-control suite. The award is a firm-fixed-price vehicle that bundles software, integrated hardware, and data infrastructure into a single commercial platform. That's not a prototype buy or a niche sensor play. It's an enterprise consolidation around a vendor that shipped its first major Lattice engagement less than eighteen months ago.
Continue reading6 sources1 contract Logistics
The Navy awarded Lynntech Inc. $10M for 35 hypoxia and dynamic breathing threat training systems under SBIR Phase III. Phase III is where small companies move from R&D to production buys, and this contract shows the mechanism working as designed. Lynntech developed the Mask-on Breathing Device (MOBD) through earlier SBIR phases; the Navy now trusts it enough to procure three dozen trainer stations and sustainment. At roughly $285k per system, the pricing is consistent with specialized physiological training hardware plus instructor stations and support software.
Continue reading4 sources1 contract Munitions / DE
The Missile Defense Agency just formalized what it quietly decided months ago: it will pay to restart the SM-3 Block IB production line rather than rely solely on the newer Block IIA variant or allied supply. The $266.9M modification definitizes two prior undefinitized actions and brings the total contract to 78 all-up rounds. The line-item that matters is buried in the award language—MDA is explicitly funding the one-time costs to bring Block IB manufacturing back online.12
Continue reading7 sources1 contract