It's The End for LM's Civil Space line of business, says Forbes:

The MRO is likely to be one of the last scientific interplanetary-exploration missions that Lockheed will be involved in.

Despite President George W. Bush's 2004 speech trumpeting the future of interplanetary exploration, NASA's $16.8 billion budget for 2007 directs about $3.5 billion into the aging Space Shuttle and International Space Station programs at the expense of other missions. These cuts will affect other government contract companies involved in the space race, like Northrop Grumman and Boeing.

Already several multimillion-dollar Lockheed contracts have been canceled, including a highly anticipated unmanned trip to icy Europa (one of Jupiter's estimated 63 moons), which scientists suspect could harbor life in its massive frozen oceans. Also on the backburner: the Terrestrial Planet Finder, a telescope system that can identify earth-like planets outside the solar system.

"NASA just doesn't have enough money, and they are being asked to make some vary hard choices," Crocker says. "It's necessary to honor our international commitments [to the space station], but its basically coming out of the planetary exploration budget."

The cancellations will affect the bottom line of Lockheed's $6.8 billion Space Systems division, but they mostly impact Crocker's Civil Space program, which includes scientific, planetary exploration and operational satellites. "My line of business is substantially affected," he says, but the company will make up that lost revenue in its other space projects.

But is this contraction really as permanent as Forbes suggests? It's hard to believe that LM would shut down Civil Space (or the other contractors take similar drastic measures) because of a few lean years of probe budgets at NASA, considering this lean period is likely to be as short as others in the past two decades have been. Budgets vary from year to year, as does NASA and Congressional support for particular missions -- look at the on-again-off-again history of New Horizons. If the scientists affected keep the heat on NASA and recruit support in Congress and the public, additional funding could be allocated to NASA in future budgets to address the science cuts being made now to support VSE. Indeed -- a cynic might argue that this is exactly the game NASA is playing.

(And why can't a major business publication seem to get the name of a major business correct? "Lockheed" ceased to exist a decade ago. Yes, the author uses the full "Lockheed Martin" at the beginning and "Lockheed" later on as shorthand, as one traditionally identifies an acronym where it is first used, but if they're going to do that, why not simply use the company's standard "LM" acronym? Not only would it be correct, it would save column space and a handful of electrons, to boot.)

Posted by T.L. James on March 12, 2006 12:45 PM