The first stage of the company’s RS1 missile after the completion of welding.
ABL Space
Lockheed Martin has chosen Los Angeles missile maker ABL Space to launch a two-year mission to Scotland, the defense contractor said Monday.
The companies said the launch, planned for 2022, will be the first satellite launch in the UK and, more broadly, the first in European soil. The mission comes with a grant from the British Space Agency’s “Pathfinder Launch” program, with the launch of the rocket from the Scottish island of Unst in the Shetland Islands.
“We want the UK to be the first in Europe to launch small satellites into orbit, attracting innovative business from around the world, accelerating the development of new technologies and creating hundreds of highly skilled jobs across the UK,” said the agency’s deputy director, Ian Annett said in a statement.
Lockheed Martin’s venture capital army is ABL Space, which is working on its first launch in California in the first half of this year. ABL builds small rockets, which, in size, fall between Elon Musk’s SpaceX and the small Rocket Lab launcher on the market, the company brought in nearly $ 100 million in venture capital and contracts before the UK award .
ABL’s RS1 rocket is 88 feet high and is designed to launch up to 1,350 kilograms (or nearly 1½ tons) of payload into Earth’s low orbit – at a cost of $ 12 million per launch. ABL’s position in the middle of the commercial launch market places it in competition with other companies, such as Virgin Orbit, Relativity Space and Firefly Aerospace, by Richard Branson. Virgin Orbit has also announced plans to launch a mission at an airport in Cornwall, England as early as 2022.
A second stage RS1 fully integrated into the test shooting at Edwards Air Force Base in 2020.
ABL Space
The launch of RS1 in Scotland will carry a spacecraft built by MOOG in the UK, which will deploy six small satellites, two of which will be technology demonstrations built by Lockheed Martin.
“We selected ABL Space Systems for the launch of Pathfinder in the UK to leverage the flexibility of ABL’s integrated GSO launch system – and RS1 rocket – which will allow us to quickly build our new site,” said Randy DeRosa, program manager. at the Lockheed Martin UK Pathfinder Launch. he said in a statement. “The ABL system is relatively easy, fast and cost effective to implement, with fantastic performance, an important capability for many of our future customers.”
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