Lockheed Martin said that it designed the LM 400 digitally at the $350 million Gateway Center production line in Waterton, Colo., 15 miles from Denver (Lockheed Martin Schematic)

Lockheed Martin said on Tuesday that its LM 400 satellite is to launch in the first six months of next year on a Firefly Aerospace Alpha rocket.

The refrigerator-sized LM 400 “is a bit of a Goldilocks approach” between the traditional, large, “monolithic” satellites and newer, small satellites for the U.S. Space Force’s Space Development Agency, Jeff Schrader, vice president of strategy and business development at Lockheed Martin Space in Littleton, Colorado, told reporters during a space forum in Crystal City, Virginia.

“LM 400 is kind of that middle ground,” he said. “LM 400 allows a mid-class bus that has more payload and more power than small sats and much less expensive and much more agile and can be built quicker than those larger systems.”

LM 400 is one of three tech demonstrations that Lockheed Martin’s space business segment is pursuing to provide technology upgrades in two years or less to aid the U.S. military in countering China — the other two demos being the Tactical Satellite Communications (TacSat) 5G payload and Pony Express 2 for advanced battle command and control and communications.

Common components on LM 400 will allow it to adapt it to a variety of orbits and missions, including missile tracking, remote sensing, and communications, Schrader said.

Lockheed Martin said in April last year that it has had several contracts for the LM 400, including one as part of RTX‘s [RTX] work for the Space Force Space Systems Command’s Missile Warning/Missile Tracking for Medium Earth Orbit (MEO) — also known as Missile Track Custody. Yet, SSC ended its contract with RTX in May for Epoch 1 Missile Track Custody because the “RTX Epoch 1 development effort was facing significant cost growth from the original agreement baseline, projecting slips to the launch schedule, and had unresolved design challenges.”

There is no “specific mission” for the LM 400 launch next year, but the “initial intent is to show that we’ve built a system, the TRL [technology readiness level] has been burned down and how long we can plan to build those in the future to offer to our customers,” Schrader said on Wednesday.

Under development for three years, LM 400 has gone through a Critical Design Review “on a government program and has been bid on several customer programs,” he said.

Lockheed Martin finished building the LM 400 satellite in December 2022, and the company said in April last year that the LM 400 had completed electromagnetic interference/electromagnetic compatibility testing and was headed to thermal vacuum testing.

“Why we plan to launch LM 400 in the first half of 2025 is effectively looking at where we need to position it in proposals to get at fielding dates that the customer has outlined,” Schrader said. “We’re through development at this point and ready to bid. Effectively, this will be ready as soon as we can get contracts for it for fielding. Missile track custody is one, but there are others that may be even in front of it. We are building this on some classified programs for the IC [intelligence community] and for DoD and also for our international customers.”

“This is gonna be a common bus that we can utilize across multiple areas so that if one person in the government pays for it, the others can take what we’ve learned from it and continue to iterate,” he said. “What we’re not gonna do is have a significant amount of NRE [non-recurring engineering] that will go with it. That’s why we wanted to do it on our own dime to get ahead of that.”

This story was first published by Defense Daily