Raytheon and AWS Forge a New Orbit for Defense Technology

AURORA, CO – December 04, 2025 – In a move that signals a profound shift in the aerospace and defense landscape, Raytheon, an RTX business, has announced a strategic collaboration with Amazon Web Services (AWS). This partnership is not merely an IT upgrade; it represents a fundamental pivot in how the United States and its allies will manage mission-critical space operations, from satellite data processing to command and control. By integrating AWS's formidable cloud computing and artificial intelligence capabilities, Raytheon is positioning itself to redefine the technological backbone of national security in the final frontier, moving critical infrastructure from siloed, on-premise hardware into a more agile, scalable, and intelligent cloud environment.

The announcement confirms what industry analysts have long observed: the future of defense is inextricably linked with commercial technology. As the volume of data from space explodes and the geopolitical environment becomes increasingly contested, the ability to process information and make decisions at machine speed is no longer an advantage but a necessity. This collaboration is a blueprint for how legacy defense giants are adapting, leveraging commercial innovation to maintain a strategic edge in the 21st century.

From Silos to the Cloud: Modernizing Mission Control

For decades, space operations have been run on bespoke, monolithic ground systems that are expensive to build, slow to update, and difficult to scale. This legacy infrastructure is ill-equipped to handle the demands of modern satellite constellations, which are growing in size and complexity. The collaboration between Raytheon and AWS directly targets these long-standing challenges, promising to usher in an era of unprecedented flexibility and efficiency.

The core objective is to help defense and intelligence customers move away from rigid, capital-intensive systems toward a more dynamic, service-oriented model. By leveraging the AWS cloud, Raytheon can offer solutions that reduce mission costs, accelerate the delivery of new capabilities, and allow for greater program flexibility. This aligns perfectly with the U.S. Space Force's own modernization initiatives, which aim to create a more resilient and responsive ground infrastructure capable of managing a diverse array of national security satellites.

"Our customers rely on Raytheon to solve their most complex problems across space, data processing, command and control, and mission management functions," said Erich Hernandez-Baquero, vice president of Space Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance at Raytheon. "This collaboration with AWS empowers our teams to accelerate responsible AI innovation, increase agility while maintaining the highest levels of security, optimize resources, and strengthen systems to drive effective results for our customers."

The AI Co-Pilot in the Command Center

At the heart of this partnership is the integration of advanced artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) into the fabric of space operations. The sheer torrent of data beamed down from modern surveillance and communication satellites has overwhelmed human analysts' capacity to review it. AI is the only viable tool to sift through this noise, identify critical patterns, and deliver actionable intelligence in real time.

Raytheon will leverage specific AWS services to make this a reality. Amazon SageMaker, a comprehensive ML platform, will enable the development and deployment of algorithms that can automate tasks like satellite imagery analysis, object detection, and predictive maintenance for space assets. Meanwhile, Amazon Bedrock provides access to powerful foundation models, which can be used to create sophisticated decision-support tools that help mission commanders interpret complex scenarios and generate reports automatically.

Perhaps most critically, the collaboration will utilize the AWS Outpost family of services. Outposts are a form of edge computing, extending AWS infrastructure and services to secure, on-premises locations or even ruggedized, forward-deployed environments. For space missions, this is a game-changer. It allows for low-latency data processing and AI analysis to happen close to the ground stations receiving satellite data, eliminating the delay of sending massive datasets to a distant cloud region. In a time-sensitive military operation, this reduction in latency—from minutes to seconds—can be the difference between success and failure.

Securing the Stars in a Contested Domain

This technological evolution is driven by a stark geopolitical reality: space is now a contested warfighting domain. The ability to protect national space assets while maintaining superior situational awareness is paramount. The Raytheon-AWS partnership is a direct response to this national security imperative, aiming to build more resilient, secure, and intelligent systems.

By leveraging the cloud, defense agencies can create a distributed and robust command and control network that is less vulnerable to physical attacks on a single ground station. The collaboration promises advanced constellation command and control using modular, software-defined systems, allowing for more dynamic tasking and coordination of satellite assets. Scalable mission management, built on AWS serverless technologies, means new capabilities can be rapidly and securely incorporated into operations as threats evolve.

"This collaboration unites the security, reliability, and higher levels of availability from AWS with Raytheon's space systems expertise to create new possibilities for our customers in the space industry," noted David Appel, vice president of U.S. Federal at Amazon Web Services. "Together, we're propelling space technology forward, ensuring our customers maintain their competitive edge in this critical domain."

A New Blueprint for Business and Defense

The strategic implications of this deal extend far beyond a single contract. It exemplifies a new business model for the defense industry, where traditional contractors act as lead integrators, harnessing the rapid innovation of the commercial tech sector to solve complex national security problems. For RTX, it's a strategic move to evolve from a hardware-centric company into a more agile provider of software-defined solutions and services, ensuring its relevance for decades to come.

For AWS, the partnership deepens its already significant footprint in the lucrative and highly secure government and defense markets. In the competitive cloud landscape, where AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud are all vying for major defense contracts like the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability (JWCC), this high-profile collaboration with a top-tier defense prime is a major strategic victory. It validates AWS's ability to handle the most sensitive and demanding workloads, further solidifying its position as a go-to provider for national security missions.

As Raytheon and AWS are already executing programs under this agreement, the impact is not hypothetical but immediate. This partnership serves as a powerful indicator of the future, where the lines between commercial technology and national defense are not just blurring but merging, creating a new industrial base built on cross-sector collaboration to secure the high ground of space.