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 Bethesda, MD-based company announced January 31.
The agile 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. The LM 400 is scalable and versatile starting at the size of the average home refrigerator, with 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. The LM 400 space vehicle is compatible with a wide range of launch vehicles in a single, ride-share or multi-launch configuration.
“This resilient LM 400 satellite bus was created completely digitally, offering greater flexibility, commonality, and the ability to rapidly configure to order across missions,” said Matt Mahlman, director of strategy and capture at Lockheed Martin Space’s Satellite Bus Center of Excellence. “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 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, which reduces the time it takes to get actionable data into the hands of mission operators and decision-makers on the ground.
Source: Lockheed Martin
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By Loren Blinde
January 31, 2023
