Maria Demaree Shares Lockheed Martin’s 3 Key IRAD Efforts

The space domain is evolving rapidly. New commercial entrants, rising military activity and growing threats are shaping the space domain, prompting government contractors to rethink their approaches and prioritize speed.

Executive Mosaic sat down with 2024 Wash100 Award winner Maria Demaree, vice president and general manager of National Security Space at Lockheed Martin, to learn more about how the company is revamping its approach to internal research and development in response to changes in space.

“We looked at our customers first and how they were really valuing getting technology on orbit more rapidly,” Demaree told Executive Mosaic’s video reporter Summer Myatt. “[There are] a lot of reasons for this, not the least of which is that the threat pace at which we are trying to move — that tempo is accelerating. Our adversaries are getting military type capabilities in space at a very rapid pace, so we want to help our customers to more quickly respond to that threat, to provide the deterrence capabilities that we provide.”

According to Demaree, Lockheed is focusing on three key initiatives to help better align the company’s IRAD efforts to its customers and to the evolving threats.

Lockheed’s National Security Space Business

In May of 2023, Lockheed streamlined its space segment, consolidating its five lines of business into three. The realignment effort was launched to improve the delivery of space capabilities to customers and to facilitate growth and tech innovation.

During this realignment, Lockheed created a new national security space line of business led by Demaree. The new business combines Lockheed’s military space line of business with the company’s work with the Intelligence Community and in ground systems, Demaree explained.

“This enables us to get that end-to-end pull through and bring solutions to our customers that meet their needs more rapidly,” she said.

Innovating With Ignite

According to Demaree, Lockheed’s “Ignite” organization is the company’s version of a rapid capabilities office. Ignite was created in March 2023 as a way for Lockheed Martin to help its customers achieve better technological maturity faster. 

“We created that organization with the goal of getting novel technology more rapidly to our customers and to get it deployed as quickly as possible,” said Demaree. “And that doesn’t matter if it’s capability that’s produced by Lockheed Martin, if it’s a commercial provider or if it’s an external company that we need to partner with to get that best-of-breed capability onto our platform.”

“It’s really our ability to be an innovation incubator, to more rapidly look at capabilities, to raise the technical readiness level so that we can get them on orbit faster,” she explained.

Rapid Capability Manufacturing At Lockheed’s Product Center

When Lockheed announced its reorganization last year, the company also created a new product center led by Mike Patton. 

“This is our capability to really more rapidly produce and manufacture capabilities and to get common capabilities across our products,” Demaree shared. “We’re going to look at more commercial ways to do production and manufacturing to accelerate getting capability to our customer.” 

For more insights on Lockheed Martin’s tech demonstrations, space innovations and IRAD priorities, watch Maria Demaree’s full video interview with Executive Mosaic.