Lockheed Martin is one of the largest aerospace contractors working on major space projects from building the spacecraft taking astronauts back to the moon, nuclear space power to a NOAA weather satellite detecting lightning strikes in real time.

But recently, the company has also been investing in a growing corner of the space market: small satellites.

The aerospace giant opened a factory in Littleton last year, called the “speed center,” to meet growing demand for the smaller spacecraft and is revving up production to hit 180 satellites a year.

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The facility has yet to finish a satellite, Kevin Huttenhoff, Lockheed Martin’s senior manager of space data transport, said Monday during a media roundtable out of the company’s Colorado Springs office ahead of the annual Space Symposium that takes place through Thursday at The Broadmoor hotel on the city’s southwest side.

There currently are 42 satellites in various stages of production out of Littleton, he said.

“We’re using this low-rate production capability right now to fine tune our processes,” Huttenhoff said.

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Lockheed Martin had to build the 20,000-square-foot Littleton site from the ground-up because “production needs to be very, very different,” he said.

The company is more used to spacecrafts that are the size of a warehouse. Meanwhile, “smallsats” are typically no bigger than a kitchen refrigerator.

Lockheed Martin built a “digital twin” of the Littleton facility in virtual reality and reproduced its manufacturing process to map out kinks in the system before any hardware came in, Huttenhoff said. When construction of the site started, he added there were some lessons they had to put back into the VR replica to find more ways to make the site more agile.

The site also uses more automation on the production line, Huttenhoff said, to speed up production and reduce human labor.

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Lockheed Martin got into building small satellites because it saw strong demand signals from both commercial and government sectors, Huttenhoff said.

“It makes sense for us to meet that response rather than just sitting back and waiting,” he said.

The smallsat market is expected to more than triple within a decade, according to a 2023 report from the former Euroconsult, now known as Novaspace after merging with SpaceTec Partners earlier this month.

Nearly 7,000 smallsats have been launched between 2013 and 2022, according to the space consulting agency. SpaceX’s Starlink network of satellites made up the majority of smallsats, but more entrants are coming in. Between 2023 and 2032, the report found, there’s expected be more than 26,000 smallsats.

The market value of smallsats will go from $30 billion during the 2010s to about $110 billion in the next decade, according to the report.

Another large aerospace contractor, Raytheon, also made a major investment in small-satellite production by acquiring Colorado-startup Blue Canyon Technologies in 2020, a leading maker of smallsats and cubesats. The RTX subsidiary has two factories in Boulder — one that opened in 2022 — and is headquartered in Lafayette.

Companies are wanting more satellites faster and cheaper, said Lockheed Martin’s Jeff Schrader, vice president of Global Situational Awareness.

That’s why demand for smallsats is rising, Schrader said.

Lockheed Martin’s Littleton “speed center” is one of three facilities working on the Tranche 2 Tracking Layer project led by the Space Development Agency, a division of the U.S. Space Force working on missile defense.

Tranche 2 aims to send a constellation of 54 satellites to detect and warn against potential missiles. Of the three sites, two are in Colorado: the Lockheed Martin site and Sierra Space’s center in Louisville. The third is with L3Harris Technologies in Melbourne, Fla.

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The 42 satellites currently in production in Littleton are part of Tranche 1 and are expected to be finished this year.

The Litteton site also has testing services for other companies working on smallsats, Huttenhoff said, to assist the many new entrants in the market.

Companies can contract with Lockheed Martin to test in its thermal cycle and electromagnetic chambers.

“That is something that we felt was the right thing to do in this environment to help have that robust marketplace,” Huttenhoff said.