Every Cosmic Herald story on Lockheed Martin — missions, launches, discoveries, and the business of space, newest first.
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.
Read the story →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.
The U.S. Space Force awarded Boeing up to $2 billion to build two new MUOS narrowband satellites, dethroning incumbent Lockheed Martin and keeping the military's UHF 'cellphone network in space' alive into the mid-2030s.
The Space Force ordered two more GPS IIIF satellites from Lockheed Martin for $514 million, pushing the next-gen order to 14 spacecraft and hardening the GPS constellation against jamming with M-Code, a digital payload, and regional power focusing.
The Space Development Agency is building a mesh network of hundreds of small military satellites in low Earth orbit — a fundamentally different approach to space-based command and control than anything the US has operated before.
Free daily briefing — missions, discoveries, and what's overhead tonight.
You're in. ✓
Check your inbox to confirm your subscription.No spam. Unsubscribe any time. Read our privacy policy.
