Lockheed Martin

Lockheed Martin is one of the world’s largest manufacturers and suppliers of military hardware with its main headquarters in Maryland, USA.

The company have over 100,000 employees around the world and in 2019 achieved sales of approximately $60bn. $23bn of this was in tactical aircraft and aeronautics. Their space division amounted to around $11bn of this total including launch services, commercial satellites, government satellites and strategic missiles.

Lockheed Martin were awarded one of the contracts to create a vertical rocket launch site in Scotland. The selected site will be at A’Mhoine in Sutherland on the North East coast of Scotland.

It wasn’t fully clear what Lockheed Martin’s involvement was to be in the Sutherland Spaceport as the original announcement suggested it was to help build the launch pad infrastructure, however, follow up announcements by the company suggested it was for the development of a space vehicle.

Lockheed Martin have recently declared that they would move away from the Sutherland Spaceport project and instead work with the Shetland Space Centre on Unst – now renamed to Saxa Vord Spaceport.