Tag: Lockheed Martin

SpaceX has won an injunction from a federal judge, preventing ULA from buying any further Russian engines.

9:03 am

SpaceX has won an injunction from a federal judge, preventing ULA from buying any further Russian engines.

Federal Claims Court Judge Susan Braden said her preliminary injunction was warranted because of the possibility that United Launch Alliance’s purchase of Russian-made engines might run afoul of the sanctions. NBC News’ past coverage of the issue was cited in Braden’s ruling.

Wednesday’s injunction prohibits any future purchases or payments by the Air Force or United Launch Alliance to NPO Energomash, unless and until the Treasury Department or the Commerce Department determines that the deal doesn’t run counter to the U.S. sanctions against Russian officials. Braden stressed that her ruling does not affect previous payments to the Russians, or purchase orders that have already been placed. United Launch Alliance says it already has some of the engines on hand.

This injunction is not directed specifically at the Air Force’s bulk buy from ULA, nor does it address the cartel-like nature of the ULA monopoly for Air Force launches that SpaceX is challenging. However, it does put a serious crimp, if temporary, on the use of Lockheed Martin’s Atlas 5 rocket, which depends on the engine for all its launches. Though the company has engines in stock, they will quickly run out with no way to immediately replace them.

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Sierra Nevada has subcontracted Lockheed Martin to help build its Dream Chaser spacecraft.

6:11 pm

Sierra Nevada has subcontracted Lockheed Martin to help build its Dream Chaser spacecraft.

The article is about the beginnings of construction at the Michoud Assembly facility in Louisiana, but to me the significant fact revealed by this article is that Jim Crocker of Lockheed Martin is involved in the effort. Crocker was one of the key engineers who came up with the solutions that helped return focus to the Hubble Space Telescope back in 1993. He is one of the country’s best aerospace engineers, and his participation here is excellent news.

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Lockheed Martin announces they will either give a full refund or refly a payload for free if their Atlas rocket fails at launch.

8:46 am

The competition heats up: Lockheed Martin announced on Wednesday that they will either give a full refund or re-fly a payload for free if their Atlas rocket fails at launch.

This means that Lockheed Martin’s customers will no longer have to shop or pay for insurance. Instead, the company is providing it for them free, thus lowering the cost for those customers.

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Lockheed Martin announced today that it is closing down five facilities and laying off 4,000 employees.

6:03 pm

Lockheed Martin announced today that it is closing down five facilities and laying off 4,000 employees.

This is actually good news for the company (reflected in a rise in its stock price today) as well as the taxpayer. Faced with less easy money from the federal government, the company is trimming some of its waste and unneeded fat. I am confident these cuts will have zero impact on their ability to operate and compete. If anything, they will improve the company’s abilities.

The cuts are also a recognition that the federal cuts from sequestration are not going away, even though those cuts have resulted in literally no visible problems in any federal program. To me, this is another demonstration that there was (and continues to be) plenty of fat in the federal government that can be trimmed away, without serious harm to any federal program.

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Lockheed Martin successfully powered up the first Orion capsule last week.

7:00 pm

Lockheed Martin successfully powered up the first Orion capsule last week.

During the test, operators in the Test Launch and Control Center (TLCC) introduced software scripts to the crew module’s main control computers via thousands of wires and electrical ground support equipment. During this process, the foundational elements, or the “heart and brains” of the entire system were evaluated. The main computers received commands from the ground, knew where to send them, read the data from different channels, and successfully relayed electrical responses back to the TLCC. The crew module power systems will continue to undergo testing for six months as additional electronics are added to the spacecraft.

It is a good thing that NASA has finally gotten this far with this very expensive capsule. However, pay no attention to their claims that the capsule “is capable of taking humans farther into space than they’ve ever gone before.” Any long journey it takes will be quite limited in scope. Humans can’t really travel beyond lunar orbit in just a capsule. You need a real interplanetary spaceship for that, and Orion does not fit this bill.

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Aerospace defense contractors Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and Raytheon all show better than expected profits despite sequestration.

8:56 am

Chicken Little report: Aerospace defense contractors Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and Raytheon all show better than expected profits despite sequestration.

It seems that each of these companies, finding their profits from defense pork to be relatively flat or dropping slightly, worked harder to sell their other products to other customers, and were generally successful. What a concept!

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The Pentagon has decided to buy its launch services from more than just Boeing and Lockheed Martin.

8:49 am

The competition heats up: The Pentagon has decided to buy its launch services from more than just Boeing and Lockheed Martin.

Under the new plan, the Air Force can buy as many as 14 launches over the next five years from possible bidders such as Space Exploration Technologies Corp, or SpaceX, and Orbital Sciences Corp . The service may also buy as many as 36 launches from United Launch Alliance, the Lockheed-Boeing venture, with an option to purchase the other 14 launches if the competitors haven’t been certified to launch military and spy satellites that can cost up to $1 billion each.

Originally the military planned to purchase all of its launches from Boeing and Lockheed. Political pressure from SpaceX has now forced them to widen the competition, or at least, make noises that they are doing so. If you read the above paragraph closely the plan still favors the original two companies and is strongly stacked to hand all the launches over to them anyway.

Update: My pessimism above was premature. SpaceX has been awarded a contract for two launches under this new policy.

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The outfitting of the first Orion capsule, scheduled to take seventeen months, has begun.

9:46 am

The outfitting of the first Orion capsule, scheduled to take seventeen months, has begun.

The article also notes that about 400 Lockheed Martin employees will participate in this work.

I might very well be wrong, but this seems to be a very long time and a very large workforce for “turning what is a shell of a structure into a real spaceship.” I wonder if the work is being stretched out, partly to delay its completion to better match up with the long timeline of the heavy lift rocket, and partly to keep these jobs alive and feed the pork to some congressional districts.

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Boeing and Lockheed Martin are both considering hiring the Russia aerospace company Energia to build components for the CST-100 and Orion manned capsules.

9:01 am

It appears that both Boeing and Lockheed Martin are considering hiring the Russia aerospace company Energia to build components for the CST-100 and Orion manned capsules.

What is going on here is that both Boeing and Lockheed Martin are looking for a subcontractor who can build these components for less money. Since labor costs in Russia are much lower than the U.S., both companies are considering Energia for this work.

This quote, however, encapsulates the cultural war that still goes on sometimes between Russia and the U.S.:

“[Russian] achievements in docking sites and [thermal protection equipment] production are quite competitive, but I am not sure that the Americans will accept our offer because they not only have the task of building a spaceship but also of gaining competence in this matter,” Dmitry Payson, director of the space and telecommunication technology department in Russia’s Skolkovo hi-tech hub, told Izvestia.

In interviewing many Russian and American space engineers over the years I have found an amazing amount of contempt from each for the work of the other, often without justification. Just as the Russians above seem to falsely think that Boeing and Lockheed Martin know nothing about docking equipment or thermal protection, American engineers repeatedly have expressed to me unjustified disdain for the space station technology developed by the Russians for Mir. The result: both countries often don’t take advantage of the other’s skills.

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The actual cost to launch

7:30 am

In writing this short post on the efforts of Lockheed Martin and Orbital Sciences to launch rockets for the small satellite market, Clark Lindsey made this comment:

It costs around $50 million to launch a Orbital Sciences Minotaur 4, which can put 1,730 kg into LEO while the Lockheed’s Athena 2 will cost around $65 million to put 1,712 kg into LEO. SpaceX currently posts charges $54M – $59.5M for launching to LEO 10,450 kg (equatorial) and 8,560 kg (polar). If SpaceX is able to sustain these prices in routine operation, it will obviously result in some disturbance to the launch industry.

Let’s deconstruct these numbers again, this time listing them by the cost per kilogram:
» Read more

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First sale for quantum computing

9:53 am

Lockheed Martin buys the first commercial quantum computer. More here on the science of quantum computing.

Quantum computers could revolutionize the way we tackle problems that stump even the best classical computers, which store and process their data as ‘bits’ — essentially a series of switches that can be either on or off. The power of quantum bits — or qubits — is that they can be on and off simultaneously. Connect enough qubits together using quantum entanglement and a computer should be able to zip through a multitude of calculations in parallel, at astonishing speed.

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