Lockheed Martin Space Systems Co. will start adding hundreds of jobs in commercial satellite design and manufacturing to its headquarters campus southwest of Denver next month.
The large space contractor, the area’s largest private-sector aerospace employer, is relocating 350 employees from its Newtown, Pennsylvania, site to its headquarters near the mouth of Waterton Canyon in Jefferson County.
A few employees have already made the move, but most of the relocating workers will arrive in June and July after a new commercial space operations center is fleshed out on the campus.
“By the latter part of this year, we will have consolidated the vast majority of commercial space business here,” said Mike Hamel, a former Air Force lieutenant general and space program expert who was named president of the Commercial Ventures business at Lockheed Martin Space Systems (LMSS) in December.
The Denver area’s job growth comes amid consolidation for parent company Lockheed Martin Corp. nationally. Late last year, the company (NYSE: LMT) decided to close the Newtown manufacturing site and move the commercial space business done there to new cleanrooms and offices at LMSS headquarters.
Out of about 1,000 workers in Newtown, 350 of them chose to move with their jobs, Hamel said. They’ll add to about 3,900 people working for LMSS locally.
The move shifts LMSS' commercial satellite production from Pennsylvania and New Jersey, where the company and its predecessors helped pioneer commercial satellite communications over the past 50 years.
About 200 of the relocated LMSS workers will focus almost exclusively on commercial satellite production, design and engineering and related work. The remainder will primarily be tied to commercial space projects but share their expertise across other civilian and military projects at LMSS, Hamel said.
The Waterton Canyon site has primarily been home to LMSS administration, and the lead design and engineering for government-related space missions for NASA — the $11.8 billion Orion deep-space crew capsule, the Juno probe en route to Jupiter, the MAVEN atmospheric explorer headed to Mars — and for military projects such as LMSS’ development of the GPS III satellite for the next-generation of Air Force and civilian global positioning systems.
The company’s commercial satellite production in Newtown made communications, television and satellite broadband satellites for customers around the world, including satellite TV companies DirecTV and EchoStar and Japan’s JSAT.
LMSS’ commercial imaging satellite technologies are primarily produced at the division's site in Sunnyvale, California.
More than 40 Lockheed commercial satellites have launched in the past couple decades, and they’ve amassed more than 400 years of combined in-orbit service, Hamel said.
Even though uprooting the commercial space operations from Newtown is part of a nationwide downsizing, the company is upbeat about the business’ future, Hamel said.
LMSS wants to reinvigorate its business in commercial communications satellites, and moving the commercial space group will allow the company to draw from different talent pools as it hires in the future, Hamel said.
“It really creates an opportunity to rebuild and refill, with new talent and new energy, some of the key engineering, program management and key business skills,” Hamel said. “We’re coming back full force into the commercial satellite business at a time when there will be more demand.”
Existing fleets of commercial satellites around worldwide are aging and needing replacement satellites built, while demand for satellite communications is expanding to parts of the developing world that have not historically been customers for commercial satellites in the past.