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Ibadan, 2 February 2023. – The first Lockheed Martin LM 400, a flexible, mid-sized satellite customizable for military, civil, or commercial users, rolled off the company’s digital factory production line and is advancing toward its planned 2023 launch. The LM 400 spacecraft bus design enables one platform to support multiple missions, including remote sensing, communications, imaging, radar, and persistent surveillance.
Lockheed Martin invested in common satellite designs to support demand for more proliferated systems, high-rate production, and affordable solutions. Furthermore, the LM 400 is scalable and versatile, starting at the average home refrigerator’s size, with the capability to grow for higher power and larger payloads and packaged to enable multiple satellites per launch.
The LM 400 bus can operate in low, medium, or geosynchronous earth orbits, providing greater flexibility than other buses in this class. Furthermore, the LM 400 space vehicle is compatible with a wide range of launch vehicles in a single, ride-share, or multi-launch configuration.
Matt Mahlman, director of strategy and capture at Lockheed Martin Space’s Satellite Bus Center of Excellence, explained, “this resilient LM 400 satellite bus was created digitally, offering greater flexibility, commonality, and the ability to configure to order across missions rapidly. Given that, we can produce these new satellites faster and at a much lower cost to our customers.”
For potential military applications, the LM 400 also conforms to Modular Open Systems Architecture standards for interoperability with other platforms from all the services. This design helps unlock the U.S. Defense Department’s vision for joint all-domain operations and joint all-domain command and control.
Each LM 400 spacecraft includes SmartSat, Lockheed Martin’s software-defined satellite architecture. SmartSat provides even greater mission adaptability and can perform onboard “Edge” data processing, reducing the time to transfer actionable data to mission operators and decision-makers on the ground.
