Lockheed Martin Space is the part of the world’s largest defense contractor that still pretends it’s a “space company” rather than a weapons manufacturer with a side hustle in orbit. They’re headquartered in Colorado, where the mountains are scenic enough to distract from the fact that most of their “innovation” comes in the form of program management PowerPoints rather than hardware flying on time.

The portfolio is what you’d expect: GPS (they’ve built every block since Reagan was still acting like SDI was going to happen), missile warning birds, Orion for NASA, and a steady stream of classified buses for customers who don’t like their acronyms spelled out. Lockheed’s commercial satellite business used to matter but after Airbus, Thales, and now Maxar carved out the GEO market, Lockheed quietly stopped pretending it cared about selling big commsats to commercial operators. Now “Space” is effectively a Pentagon and NASA contractor shop with the occasional commercial cameo.

Their Mars and deep space work is a bright spot, Orion actually exists, even if it’s grotesquely over budget, and they’re still milking Mars sample return studies like they’ll get a Nobel Prize in PowerPoint. But for all the talk of “pioneering exploration,” their balance sheet depends on the far less romantic task of making sure the US military can keep its satellites functioning and its hypersonic dreams funded.

They also like to position themselves as a LEO player, which is adorable. Their “Pony Express” cubesats were marketed as a testbed for “smart sat” technology, as if Lockheed suddenly discovered the concept of reprogrammability a decade after startups had already been doing it. They’ve dabbled in smallsat buses, but let’s be real, nobody is hiring Lockheed to build a 150-kilogram satellite when you can call Blue Canyon or Rocket Lab for half the cost and ten times the responsiveness.

The real value of Lockheed Space is the contracts pipeline. They’ve mastered the art of wrapping every project in national security urgency, making sure nothing ever gets fully competed, and billing the government as if they were hand-carving satellites out of platinum. In that sense, they’re not a space company at all. They’re an annuity with a launch pad.