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Lockheed Martin’s most senior space leader in Australia has said his company is “hopeful” JP9102 contracts could return after its surprise axing earlier this month.
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Speaking at the Space & Earth conference in WA on Tuesday, David Ball told the audience the prime was going to “employ a lot of people in Melbourne” to fulfil the deal and urged the federal government to continue to invest in local companies.
The intervention from Lockheed Martin Space’s regional director is believed to be the first public comment from the prime since the $3 billion project to deliver a new military satcom capability for Australia was effectively cancelled.
The Australian, which broke the story, claimed the decision was due to a lack of budget, but multiple officials subsequently insisted the money is still there, and only the tender with Lockheed was ripped up.
Defence Minister Richard Marles then argued the decision was actually taken because multiple low-Earth orbit satellites are more secure from attacks than a single geostationary spacecraft, as planned by Lockheed.
“We had a great lineup of Australian companies [for JP9102] to come and help us build the network, sustain the network, and operate the network, and we’re hopeful that will come around again as government reforms its thinking within those areas,” Ball said on stage.
“It’s really important that we participate here… we were going to employ a lot of people in Melbourne, around the engineering centre for JP9102.
“From a Lockheed Martin perspective, we employ about 1,600 people across Australia today, everywhere except Tasmania, and that’s going to probably double in the next three or four years, given the amount of work we have on with other capabilities that the government has acquired.
“So it’s really important to act locally, even though we’re a big global company. We’re here for a reason, and really, that reason is to embrace Australian industry and see how we can go forward.”
It comes after Defence’s Director General of Space Capability told an audience in Canberra earlier this month that JP 9102 would be replaced. Speaking at MilCIS, Air Commodore Peter Thompson insisted the project was “not dead” and argued that the threat from adversaries had evolved.
“The only thing that changed was our potential procurement activity with Lockheed Martin,” he said on stage. “The capabilities have changed immensely since first pass. The threat is changing as well.
“Defence isn’t going to waste money on something that is no longer the best use of our money that we’ve got.”
JP 9102 was only signed off just 18 months ago, with prime contractor Lockheed Martin beating big hitters including Boeing, Northrop Grumman Australia, and Optus to become the “preferred tenderer”.
If approved, JP 9102 would have created more than 200 direct jobs, while Lockheed itself pressed ahead with making key appointments for its staff to oversee it.
Speaking to the ABC after Defence released a 187-word statement confirming the changes to JP 9102, Marles said that since the tender was announced eight years ago, industry has created technology that can “literally shoot satellites out of the sky”.
“But we’ve also seen technologies develop where you have thousands of microsatellites in a much more distributed way providing the same effect,” he said.
“We believe we can do that in this way faster and more cost-effective. So, this is frankly moving with the times and making sure that we have the capability that we need which meets the threats and the opportunities that we have in the future.”
