"Certainly, it's a big loss for Raytheon," Marco Caceres, a senior analyst at the Teal Group, said in an e-mail. "The issue of tracking space debris will only grow substantially in importance over the next few years, as potentially thousands of new micro, nano, pico, and femto satellites will be launched to low earth orbit." He added, "The Space Fence is a billion-dollar program that will continue to grow in value for decades to come, so it would have represented a long-term revenue stream for Raytheon."

Raytheon’s Quiet Eyes is one of several examples of new directed energy weaponry, a munitions class that includes lasers, highpowered microwaves and particle beams. Spending on surface-to-air missile-zapping will average $830 million a year over the next decade, estimates Teal Group, a defense consultancy, up from $450 million today. Directed energy technology is wellrooted in many of the 2,900 “threat reduction” research programs at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. “We see a future in lower-cost systems, and Raytheon has both a head start and a very solid production base already with its [Sidewinder] missiles,” says David Rockwell, a senior electronics analyst at Teal. “It could be a big deal for them.”