LM400
COLORADO SPRINGS—Lockheed Martin Space’s newly established Ignite unit, a Skunk Works-like business development team designed to rapidly mature and progress new technologies for U.S. national defense, security and exploration customers, is ramping up activity with five internally funded pathfinder programs either already on-orbit or destined for launch within the next two years.
The announcement was made at this week’s Space Symposium here.
Citing the rapid pace of change in technology development and the destabilizing impact of recent global events such as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Dan Tenney, vice president of strategy and business development at Lockheed Martin Space, says such events “require us to move with a sense of urgency. So, we have developed a new team called Ignite.”
The unit is targeted at three main missions—exploratory research and development, accelerating the pace of technology development and, lastly, introducing new product innovations.
Key programs under the Ignite umbrella include the LM 400, a midsize, multimission spacecraft bus designed for operation in low, medium or geostationary orbit. The scalable, modular vehicle forms part of the company’s modernized family of digital enabled satellite designs, and–due to its focus on commonality across missions–is aimed at faster production and lower costs. Initial customers for the LM 400 include the U.S. Space Force, which plans to use it in the Missile Track Custody program in medium Earth orbit.
The first LM 400 Tech Demonstrator has been completed and is undergoing a battery of tests. Electro-magnetic interference and electro-magnetic compatibility evaluations have just been completed and thermal vacuum testing is getting underway, Tenney says. Planned for launch later this year, the vehicle will carry a Lockheed Martin-produced narrowband communications Electronically Steered Array (ESA) payload. The next LM 400 demonstrator, expected to launch in 2024, will test synthetic aperture radar-capable ESA on orbit using the LM 400 platform.
Others include the Pony Express 2–a pair of smallsats that will be launched later this year to demonstrate NASA-standard delay-tolerant, mesh networking and tactical communications, as well as several Lockheed Martin-developed capabilities. These will include mission-flexible distributed application technology, autonomous mission tasking, constellation-level mission management, and self-healing systems abilities.
The Pony Express 2 mission will integrate four Lockheed Martin payloads on two 12U Terran Orbital space vehicles. The payloads will provide a tactical communications system, a Ka-band crosslink and mesh network, precision relative ranging and time synchronization across the satellites, and a high-end CPU/processor, the company says.
A third program, TacSat (tactical intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance and communications satellite), is also due for launch later this year. Designed to serve as test platforms for military networks that are trying to connect air, ground, naval and space systems, the development required engineers at Lockheed Martin Space to work with other defense systems-related divisions of the company such Aeronautics and Missiles and Fire Control, to combine network requirements.
The demonstration-class spacecraft is designed to provide advanced, reconfigurable connectivity, sensing, and processing for interoperation with tactical systems in cross-domain military demonstrations. The spacecraft will incorporate Lockheed Martin’s first on-orbit use of a 5G payload developed for military applications which provides a tactical low Earth orbit-based 5G network comms to users on multiple platforms. It will also include an infrared sensing payload integrated with processing capability to demonstrate indications, warning, tracking, and targeting of threats.
A fourth program, Parsec, is in development to provide a network of satellites in lunar orbit to support navigation, timing and communication services for other spacecraft around the Moon or on the surface. The service will be provided by Lockheed Martin’s newly established Crescent Space Services company and will be based on a spacecraft bus called Curio which the company developed for NASA’s Janus and Lunar Trailblazer smallsat missions. The first Parsec satellites are expected to launch in 2025.
The fifth program, dubbed LINUSS (Lockheed Martin’s In-space Upgrade Satellite System) includes two experimental 12U CubeSats, which last month demonstrated close proximity operations by flying within 400 m of each other.
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