Lockheed Martin Space Systems Co. Wednesday opened the new headquarters for its commercial satellite business, heralding the addition of hundreds of local jobs by Colorado's largest private-sector aerospace employer.
About 200 guests gathered at the company's 4,000-employee campus near Waterton Canyon in Jefferson County to mark the opening.
Lockheed Martin Space Systems (LMSS) is moving its communications and remote sensing satellite-building operation from Newtown, Pennsylvania, a location it's closing as part of a larger restructuring.
LMSS' top executive, Rick Ambrose, told the Denver Business Journal that concentrating the commercial division at the same site where the company builds GPS III global positioning satellites, GOES-R weather satellites and other projects for the U.S. military makes sense because that work relates to the company's A2100 core satellite platform.
Other projects, such as the OSIRIS-Rex asteroid mining probe for NASA, add to the kinds of work LMSS employees in Colorado could have a hand in. That provides LMSS flexibility to keep highly trained workers on staff as space projects come and go, Ambrose said.
"We get a lot of knowledge sharing as people work across the many customers and technologies we have," Ambrose said. "And you provide some stability ... This is aerospace and defense — programs build up and ramp down, and it's hard if you're in a remote site with people and giving them the kind of security they want with their families."
LMSS is one of four large business divisions of Bethesda, Maryland-based defense giant Lockheed Martin Corp. LMSS is best known for its military and NASA work locally. But nationally, the company has built 100 commercial communications and remote sensing satellites for client companies dating back to the 1960s.
About 180 workers relocated from Newtown and other LMSS sites in recent months, filling about half of the positions LMSS ultimately plans to move in to the new commercial space headquarters.
The remaining jobs from the total of 350 commercial space positions being relocated to Jefferson County should be moved in by mid-2015, Ambrose said.
The positions are high-paying and span everything from engineering and software to supply-chain management and manufacturing, said Mike Hamel, general manager of the commercial satellite business at LMSS.
"The jobs that are coming here and will be created here are very, very important," he said.
The company expects growth across all aspects of its Jefferson County headquarters in coming years as both private sector space and, eventually, military and NASA space missions rebound and create more business, Ambrose said.
The commercial satellite headquarters building once was a testing site for Titan rockets but today has been repurposed as an office building. It's where satellite design, on-orbit operations and some testing is done. Manufacturing and some other facets of satellite production are handled elsewhere on the LMSS campus.
In September, the state office of economic development approved LMSS to receive up to $15 million in state tax breaks over the next eight years if it creates 500 new jobs.
It's money well invested, Gov. John Hickenlooper said in remarks before helping cut the ribbon on the commercial space headquarters building. The way the incentives are structured, the state will make more money in income taxes from each position added than is provided in tax-breaks to LMSS, he said.
Being home to the company's commercial satellite division is the kind of economic development win that states vie for nationally, Hickenlooper said.
"This is what it's all about," he said. "It's not just the 500 jobs, or the construction leading up to this — it's that Lockheed is a corporate leader."
With 3 percent of the workforce directly employed in aerospace, Colorado already has the highest rate of aerospace workers per-capita of any state, Hickenlooper said.
Other companies pay attention to that, and it adds to national recognition of the highly educated workforce Colorado offers and that draws the interest of employers, Hickenlooper said.
The state's aerospace industry roots are in military and civil government space projects, but federal budgets are tight and that's not expected to change in the next year or two.
Landing the commercial satellite production of Lockheed Martin is significant given aerospace trends, said Maj. Gen. Jay Lindell, the state government's aerospace and defense industry "champion"
"Commercial space is the way space is going — it's the growing segment right now," Lindell said.
About 40 of the commercial satellites that LMSS has built are based on the company's A2100 satellite platform, which LMSS is redesigning to be more capable and affordable.
The new version will be more compact inside a rocket fairing, allowing two to be launched side-by-side into orbit despite having larger solar arrays than current versions. The changes make the satellites cheaper to launch and give the satellite more power, the company says.