Lockheed Martin opens Colorado commercial space HQ as it adds hundreds of jobs

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Greg Avery

Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper (center) shakes hands with Mike Hamel, general manager of commercial space for Lockheed Martin Space Systems Co., as Rick Ambrose, executive vice president of LMSS, looks on Wednesday at the opening of a new headquarters in Jefferson County for the company's commercial space division.

Greg Avery

Reporter- Denver Business Journal

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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 3,800-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.

Greg Avery covers tech, telecom, aerospace, bioscience and media for the Denver Business Journal and writes for the "TechFlash" blog. Phone: 303-803-9222.