COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo.—Lockheed Martin [LMT] earlier this year stood up a new innovation arm within its Space segment to quickly ramp up research, development and demonstration efforts and test new capabilities and technologies to be able to more quickly respond to rapidly changing and emerging threats and meet customer needs.
The IGNITE effort has three primary missions, including exploratory research and development, accelerated technology development, including finding new ways of doing business, and meeting the hardware and software capabilities needed for tomorrow, Dan Tenney, vice president for Strategy and Business Development at Lockheed Martin Space, told reporters at the company’s innovation center here.
IGNITE is made up of more than 1,000 engineers, technical professionals and others within Lockheed Martin Space and can draw on the segment’s 22,000 employees depending on the projects underway.
“Their whole mission is designed to move with speed and urgency,” Tenney said. “They’re not necessarily the arm that would produce at scale. For us, they’re the arm that shows the technology is viable, explores new research and development activities across the organization.”
Sonia Phares leads IGNITE as vice president. She previously was vice president, Engineering & Technology at Lockheed Martin Space in charge of advanced technology efforts.
IGNITE is a reorganization of advanced technology and other innovation projects to bring disparate groups together, streamline processes and meet the “sense of urgency” needed to evolve technology and help customers outpace threats, Phares told
Defense Daily in a separate interview.
The types of exploratory R&D that IGNITE is focused on includes things like artificial intelligence, quantum communications and optical sensing, she said.
In the area of accelerated technology development, IGNITE is maturing technologies. For example, Lockheed Martin Space in in the final stages of developing the LM 400, a new scalable, modular, multi-mission satellite bus that the company plans to produce rapidly at lower costs and on a production line that allows flexibility for different payloads.
The first LM 400 in December 2022 successfully completed electromagnetic interference/electromagnetic compatibility testing, which demonstrates that signals from the satellite’s bus components don’t interfere with onboard operational payloads. Next up is completion of thermal vacuum (TVAC) testing.
Phares said the LM 400 will offer the opportunity to test out electronically steerable arrays to raise their technology readiness levels.
IGNITE will also expand the use of the company’s HiveStar software onto satellites, Phares said. The company has already demonstrated the technology on drones and plans to showcase how the software can be used on a group, or hive, of satellites to automatically maintain their tasking if one or more spacecraft are lost or if new satellites are added to the constellation, she said.
For product innovation, Phares said her group will be able to offer capabilities it has developed or is developing directly to the market. For example, she said the TVAC testing capability the company has for the LM 400 can be sold. Solar arrays and the electronically steerable arrays are other products that can also be sold outright, she said.
In addition to having its own technology projects, IGNITE is also supporting other efforts within the Space Segment like the Tactical Satellite (TacSat) demonstration spacecraft that will launch later this year to demonstrate “space-enabled warfare,” the company said.
TacSat has been internally-funded to rapidly demonstrate reconfigurable connectivity, sensing and processing to meet the needs of tactical warfighters to quickly combat maneuverable threats, at long ranges in contested and denied environments, John Schierling, director for Tactical Space Programs at Lockheed Martin Space, said during the media briefings.