Every Cosmic Herald story on Lockheed Martin — missions, launches, discoveries, and the business of space, newest first.
Five days after an automated abort, a Falcon 9 lifted 21 Northrop Grumman Transport Layer satellites from Vandenberg on Oct. 10. That brings the Space Development Agency to 84 of the 126 data-relay satellites planned for Tranche 1, with five of nine launches still to go.
Read the story →Five months after killing the $6.27 billion OCX program, the Space Force is starting work on a new GPS ground-control architecture while a Lockheed Martin stopgap keeps the constellation flying.
NASA's nuclear rotorcraft just got 17,315 feet of wiring installed at Johns Hopkins APL, and its 500-mile dune-field landing zone on Titan now has an official name: Ahmakiq Undae.
Seattle startup Gravitics has landed a Lockheed Martin subcontract to build three flight-ready Orbital Carriers for the Pentagon's Golden Dome missile-defense architecture, with demos slated for 2027-2028.
Amazon, Lockheed, Northrop, Rocket Lab, and York each pocket roughly $12M to prove their satellites can talk to a backbone SpaceX is building — and to each other.
Firefly Aerospace's Q2 10-Q and August 11 investor call confirm the Alpha Block 2 debut has slipped to Q4 2026, after an in-flight booster rupture and a September 2025 test-stand explosion forced a heavier redesign.
The Pentagon has put firm dates on Golden Dome's hardest problem: space-based interceptor ground tests by end of 2026, two orbital flight tests in 2027, and an intercept demo in 2029 — with up to $3.2 billion spread across 12 companies and Gen. Michael Guetlein holding the program to a falsifiable clock.
NNSA has handed the Space Force its fifth next-generation Global Burst Detector, the multi-lab sensor payload that turns GPS satellites into a 24/7 nuclear detonation watch — announced the same day the Space Force offloaded its troubled M-code receiver program to the Air Force.
MAVEN data show Mars powers its discrete auroras with a miniature Dungey cycle running on 4-billion-year-old crustal magnetism — 42 of 49 events matched reconnection-friendly conditions. The orbiter died in 2025; the archive is still doing first-order science.
The Space Force tripled its NSSL Phase 3 Lane 1 ceiling to $17 billion across seven launch providers on July 17, 2026 — but a GAO report showing commercial launches at federal ranges have more than quadrupled since 2021 suggests the real bottleneck isn't rockets, it's the ground beneath them.
L3Harris and Sierra Space will build 36 new missile-tracking satellites for $1.75 billion, pushing the Space Development Agency's Tranche 3 constellation to 104 spacecraft in support of the Golden Dome missile-defense architecture.
Houston's Venus Aerospace raised a $91 million Series B on July 8, 2026, to scale its rotating detonation rocket engine from prototype toward production, with NASA Marshall already testing the same architecture.
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