Kratos Defense & Security Solutions has broken ground in Odon, Indiana, on two complexes: an approximately 183,000-square-foot facility to repair, test and sustain the US Navy’s AN/SPY-1 radar, and the Helios arc jet and laser facility for hypersonic thermal protection testing. Kratos announced the groundbreaking on October 14, 2026, citing $35 million in Department of War Industrial Base Analysis and Sustainment (IBAS) funding combined with company cost-sharing.
Both projects reach construction a year after their awards. In October 2025, Kratos won Phase 1 of a Navy effort to build an organic sustainment capability for AN/SPY-1, the passive phased-array radar at the core of the Aegis Combat System, along with the IBAS contract for Helios. Both sites sit near Naval Surface Warfare Center (NSWC) Crane, where Kratos is concentrating hypersonic testing, rocket motor production and now radar sustainment.
Inside the SPY-1 Radar Sustainment Complex Near NSWC Crane
The Indiana Radar Integration Complex (IRIC), known internally at Kratos as Project Anaconda, sits within 1.5 miles of NSWC Crane. Its planned footprint has grown from the 155,000 square feet announced in October 2025 to approximately 183,000 square feet. Kratos owns and operates the site, which will support battle sparing, testing and prototyping as the Navy builds long-term organic and depot-level sustainment capacity, and previously targeted operations in 2027.
Phase 1, awarded through NSWC Crane and Program Executive Office Integrated Warfare Systems (PEO IWS), covers repair, overhaul and modernization processes for the radar’s transmitter, signal processor and antenna subsystems, along with digital engineering and AI-enabled data management. Kratos puts the program’s initial total projected ceiling at $175 million across multiple phases.
Publicly available specifications indicate that SPY-1 is an S-band passive electronically scanned array built by Lockheed Martin, with roughly 4,350 radiating elements on each of the four fixed faces of the SPY-1D fitted to Arleigh Burke-class destroyers, fed by centralized high-power transmitters. Decades of upgrades have produced SPY-1A, -1B, -1D and -1D(V) variants with diverging configurations, which NSTXL, manager of the S²MARTS prototyping agreement NSWC Crane used for the award, says has made long-term maintenance more complex after years of unfunded sustainment. With arrays projected to serve through 2060 on more than 70 Flight I, II and IIA destroyers, while Flight III hulls carry the active-array AN/SPY-6(V)1, a dedicated repair and surge source at Crane targets a readiness risk that will outlast the radar’s original production base.
How Helios Bridges the Hypersonic Materials Testing Gap
Helios, awarded in October 2025 with a total projected contract value of $68.3 million, pairs a 20 to 25 megawatt (MW) arc jet with a 200-kilowatt (kW) fiber laser to evaluate thermal protection systems (TPS) for hypersonic vehicles. An arc jet heats a test gas with an electric arc and expands it through a nozzle, reproducing the high-enthalpy flow and sustained heating that a glide body nose tip or leading edge endures in flight. Kratos has not published test conditions, but a coupled laser typically adds localized heat flux on top of the arc jet flow, stressing materials beyond uniform heating.
Kratos positions Helios as a mid-tier asset. Publicly available data show the large government arc jets operate at far higher power: the Interaction Heating Facility at NASA Ames Research Center runs a 60 MW arc heater, and the H3 segmented arc heater at the Arnold Engineering Development Complex (AEDC) is rated at 70 MW. Kratos argues those sites have become a testing bottleneck, while university and industry rigs offer only low-fidelity screening. Helios targets the space between, letting material developers iterate designs before committing scarce time at national facilities.
Kratos selected Odon after a multistate site competition. Its latest announcement also ties Helios to high-energy laser work for integrated air and missile defense, counter-unmanned aircraft systems (C-UAS) and force protection, without explaining how a materials test facility would serve those missions.
How Kratos Is Building an Industrial Cluster Around Crane
IRIC and Helios add to a concentration of Kratos investment in southern Indiana. In January 2025, the company won the five-year Multi-Service Advanced Capability Hypersonic Test Bed (MACH-TB) 2.0 agreement, worth up to $1.45 billion, to supply low-cost hypersonic flight test beds. It has since broken ground on a 68,000-square-foot payload integration facility in Crane for that program. With Rafael Advanced Defense Systems, Kratos also formed Prometheus Energetics, a solid rocket motor joint venture near Crane backed by up to $175 million, with production projected for 2027.
The logic is vertical. Kratos can fly hypersonic test articles under MACH-TB, build motors through Prometheus and now screen the thermal protection materials those vehicles depend on at Helios, all within reach of the NSWC Crane engineering workforce. The SPY-1 complex extends the same proximity model into naval sensor sustainment. Dave Carter, president of Kratos Defense and Rocket Support Services, presented the pairing of radar sustainment and hypersonic material testing as a way of “addressing critical readiness bottlenecks.” Chief executive Eric DeMarco called both facilities products of the company’s internally funded, first-to-market model.
Analysis: The SPY-1 effort carries the more immediate readiness weight. The Navy will operate SPY-1 destroyers alongside SPY-6 ships for decades, and SPY-1 variants also equip Aegis Ashore in Romania and Poland and the Aegis fleets of Japan, South Korea, Spain, Norway and Australia, none of which the IRIC announcement addresses. A second repair source reduces dependence on original-equipment supply chains for a sensor that underwrites US ballistic missile defense at sea. Helios addresses the ground-test capacity that government auditors have repeatedly flagged as a drag on US hypersonic development. The risk sits in the business model, since both sites rely on company capital that pays off only if Navy follow-on phases and test demand materialize.
The next markers are the Navy’s decision on follow-on SPY-1 phases and the first production repairs at IRIC. Kratos has not published a construction schedule or initial operating date for Helios, nor clarified how the $35 million cited at the groundbreaking divides between IBAS funding and company cost-share, or how it relates to the $68.3 million Helios award.