Perennial Autonomy is awarded a $500 million contract by the Department of Defense.

America’s race to counter emerging drone threats has been boosted by a $500 million contract the Department of Defense has awarded to California-based Perennial Autonomy. In an announcement Monday, the Pentagon’s Joint Interagency Task Force 401 said the contract would accelerate the department’s “capacity to deploy and scale low-cost, attritable air-to-air drone interceptors to protect warfighters and power projection platforms at home and abroad.” The three-year contract includes artificial-intelligence-enabled counter-drone systems currently being employed by the U.S. Central Command in the Middle East, the organization said. “Drones are the defining threat of our time,” said U.S. Army Brig. Gen. Matt Ross, director of the task force, in a statement released by Perennial Autonomy. “The proliferation of inexpensive unmanned aerial systems allows nonstate actors and individuals to access intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance and precision strike tools in ways that were previously only available to state actors. We must be proactive with creating a layered defense that deploy and scale low-cost, attritable air-to-air drone interceptors at all our facilities at home and abroad.”

Future spacecraft could use a single propellant to perform both rapid movements and slow, highly controlled adjustments.

The S&P 500 and Nasdaq indexes fell on Tuesday as a rebound in technology shares faded.

Alphabet entered a cloud service agreement with SpaceX to pay $920 million per month for 200 megawatts of capacity from October 2026 through June 2029.