Sierra Nevada Corp.’s chairwoman and co-owner, Eren Ozmen, grins as she dances alone to the pop-funk beat blaring from the ballroom stage of the Sheraton Denver Downtown Hotel. Clapping her hands in front of a 19-foot LED screen to kick off Sierra Nevada’s annual “Leadership Forum,” Ozmen encourages the 300 or so employees in the audience to get up and move on this early April morning.

The song—“Happy,” by Pharrell Williams—matches her mood: Ozmen is almost certain that the aerospace-defense company she bought with her husband, Fatih, back in 1994 will win the U.S. Air Force’s prestigious contract to develop the next Doomsday planes. These are the hardened airborne command posts reserved for top military and political brass in case of nuclear war or other catastrophes, like an asteroid strike.

Sure enough, SNC lands the deal 22 days later, on April 26. Next year’s song? “I’m thinking ‘We Are the Champions,’ ” Ozmen says.

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The contract is worth $13.1 billion over 12 years and is a game-changer for privately held SNC, which booked just $2 billion in revenue last year. For the longest time, the company, which is based outside Reno in Sparks, Nevada, has been firmly entrenched in the middle tier of the aerospace-defense industry, miles away from the industry’s five giants, including Lockheed Martin (revenue: $67.6 billion) and Northrop Grumman ($39.3 billion). Boeing, nearly 40 times as big as SNC at $77.8 billion in sales, was considered a shoo-in for the contract because it designed the four current E-4B—a.k.a. “Doomsday”—planes back in the 1970s. It has had contracts to maintain them ever since—worth some $150 million per year—and its four-engine 747-8 jumbo jets were considered the best models to accommodate the next generation. Whoever won the contract would be retrofitting up to eight used Boeing jets. SNC’s victory was a bit of a surprise. “You would have looked at this and said, ‘Well, yeah, that’ll go to Boeing,’ ” says American Enterprise Institute defense analyst Todd Harrison.

“Taking smart risks is very important,” says Ozmen, who transformed SNC into the country’s biggest female-owned defense contractor by doing just that. “That is a big part of being an entrepreneur. Without that, really, you’re just following what’s happening—you’re not leading.”

An E-4B aircraft (one of the existing Doomsday planes) is about to get refueled mid-flight in May.

The Survivable Airborne Operations Center contract, as the Doomsday project is called, is a mountain of technical and management challenges. To grab it from Boeing, the Ozmens had to agree to do a minority of the project at a fixed price, bearing cost overruns themselves. That could prove difficult for the ambitious company. After all, the same sort of provision created a $2 billion (and growing) hole in Boeing’s balance sheet for the much-delayed........

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