The money represents ATK/Thiokol's share of three contracts worth $626 million that the U.S. Air Force in early February agreed to award Northrop Grumman Corp. to refurbish and upgrade the nation's aging Minuteman III strategic missile system.

"Those contracts will extend our Minuteman program well into 2009, and provide continuing work for some very talented people," ATK/Thiokol spokesman George Torres said.

Under the contracts with Northrop Grumman, ATK/Thiokol will be called upon to replace the solid-fuel propellant on the first-, second- and third-state motors of 212 missiles. The company earlier received contracts to upgrade the motors on an initial 500 Minuteman missiles. It is in the midst of completing that work.

Torres noted the work will be split between ATK/Thiokol's Bacchus campus in Magna and its Promontory plant just west of Brigham City. The company has about 600 people - 350 at Promontory and 250 at its Bacchus facilities - working on the Minuteman project.

The Minuteman arsenal, which represents the nation's last remaining land-based strategic missile system, was built and deployed in the 1960s at the height of the Cold War. The U.S. Air Force in 1998 launched an initiative to refurbish and update all the components on its missile and to replace the aging solid-fuel propellant within their motors. The goal was to ensure the system remained viable through 2020.

When the U.S. Air Force announced it intended to upgrade the aging Minuteman system, the Minneapolis-based Alliant Techsystems with its extensive Utah operations in western Salt Lake County, and Thiokol, with its rocket motor manufacturing business near Brigham City, were members of rival bid teams eager to get a share of the contracts estimated at $1.9 billion over a 10-year period.

Initially, Thiokol's team won the bid, but that changed in 2001 when ATK purchased its rival for $700 million.

ATK/Thiokol's new contracts should provide another boost to an already healthy level of defense spending in the state, said James Wood, director of the Bureau of Economic and Business Research at the University of Utah.

"Defense spending in Utah has been increasing the past several years," he said. "We are in a war, after all, and they [the U.S. Department of Defense] have money to spend."

Although 2005's figures are not tabulated, defense spending in Utah totaled $3.2 billion in 2004, a figure that is expected to grow because of continuing geopolitical tensions, according to figures from the Governor's Office of Planning and Budget.

steve@sltrib.com