Lockheed Martin not building satellites profitably

Aerospace giant Lockheed Martin (LM), disclosing the numbers in a filing to the USA’s Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC), said that it has lost millions of dollars in building three communications satellites.

LM said that the three satellites, including Japan’s JCSAT-17 launched earlier this week on an Arianespace rocket, represented cumulative losses of about $410 million.

The two other satellites were built for Arabsat (Arabsat-6A and the HellasSat-4). HellasSat was a condominium satellite with Saudi Arabia’s GeoSat-1.

LM, in its filing with the SEC, said the three satellites “experienced performance issues related to the development and integration” of their newly developed LM2100 platform.