Lockheed Martin awarded 914M Air Force contract

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The U.S. Air Force has awarded Lockheed Martin a $914 million contract to improve its operations in space.Lockheed’s Space Fence solution is an advanced ground-based radar system that will allow the United States to improve the way objects are tracked in space by enhancing how it detects, catalogs and measures more than 200,000 orbiting objects, according to a news release. In turn, the system will also prevent potential space-based collisions.

“Space-based technologies enable daily conveniences such as weather forecasting, banking, global communications and GPS navigation, yet every day these critical services are being threatened by hundreds of thousands of objects orbiting Earth,” said Dale Bennett, executive vice president of Lockheed Martin’s Mission Systems and Training business. “Space Fence will locate and track these objects with more precision than ever before to help the Air Force transform space situational awareness from being reactive to predictive.”

Construction for the new system is slated to begin in early 2015 on the Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands.  It is expected to operate in 2018.  The value of the project is expected to exceed more than $1.5 billion over an eight-year period, the release said.

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