Space: Reliance and Resilience

Jeremy King, Chief Executive Australia and New Zealand

Address to the Williams Foundation, Fight Tonight: Exploiting Australia’s Strategic Advantage

23 April 2026

Lockheed Martin has engaged in the space domain since the beginning of the space age. We are proud to work hand-in-hand with allies and partners around the world today.

Our work extends across civil, commercial, and military domains. It is hard to not overstate how proud the company is. celebrating the return of the Artemis II crew, who travelled in the Lockheed Martin built Orion spacecraft – having travelled more than 1 million kilometres to the Moon and back.

In Australia, Lockheed Martin has an over 80 year commitment to the national interest, which extends to the space domain. This includes the operation of our Ground Station in Uralla NSW as well as our work on Geoscience Australia’s Satellite Based Augmentation Service, SouthPAN, and more.

To begin, I want to underscore what is known to many in the room: Space is no longer a distant frontier, it is essential infrastructure to our lives as we now know it and is becoming central to modern militaries around the world.

In both we are seeing a convergence of space need from position, timing and navigation, to communications, banking, weather, insurance and ISR.

In fact, the now published Independent Review into the Security of Critical Infrastructure Act has seen space listed as a dependency in every sector considered.

For those less familiar with this technology,  we are now seeing thousands, and soon to be tens of thousands, of satellites all operating above us – with Low Earth Orbit (LEO) a focus of mega constellations.

Risks and threats are abound. A recently published ‘CRASH Clock’ raised eyebrows when it estimated that if satellites lost the ability to manoeuvre, it would take only 3 days until collisions started to occur. As such, threats posed through solar weather and collision avoidance are front of mind.

However, Defence knows better than most that some of threats posed by state actors are ones being faced already: Jamming, spoofing, and unsolicited rendezvous proximity operations are stand out features of space operations in the grey-zone.

Finding a line between ‘hard kill’ and ‘soft kill’ can be wafer thin at times when dependencies on space systems are paramount to the operation of the warfighter. In keeping with the theme of today, I posit that this is a genuine fight tonight environment right now.

Reporting from around the world has shown space to be at the centre of conflicts – be it a cyber-attack on satellite ground systems at the start of Russia’s full scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022; or the constant battle of EW jamming over both Ukraine and the Middle East that continues today.

Therefore, resilience is critical and space architectures have been evolving rapidly to improve resilience.

As a result, solutions are being sought across all orbital regimes.

Benefiting from the fact that space technology life cycles have been moving at breakneck speed. The opportunity gained for the warfighter through enhanced space capabilities can provide for an asymmetric advantage, so long as it can be harnessed. However, this speed has also presented problems via outpacing historically more slow and methodical procurement models.

The assets depended upon by Defence need to be able to not just Fight Tonight but be able to survive the first night and have assured paths to reliable and continued access for the ADF.

I would suggest the acronym: PACE: Primary – Alternate – Contingency – and Emergency – offers an effective methodology to assess and think about some space capabilities.

Clearly the Primary solution should be resilient by design and fit-for-purpose in a contested threat environment.

Alternate systems provide for that complimentary capability to augment requirements, such as commercial; and then you have Contingent and Emergency in the event of degraded networks.

Looking forward, the US is progressing next-generation technologies to replace, augment, and compliment their space architectures – across all orbits. This includes the MUOS Service Life Extension as well as the next-generation of Advanced Extremely High Frequency satellites.

This is occurring in parallel to the rapid development cycle with the Space Development Agency’s LEO based Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture (PWSA) and MILNET.

Today’s space domain is increasingly contested, you have to only look to the 2026 Secure World Foundation’s Counterspace Capabilities Report to see it tracking 13 nations – having started in 2018 with tracking only three.

ADF leadership has consistently underscored that to ensure the effects of space superiority are achieved, it is best sought collaboratively with allies and partners rather than going it alone.

Only last month, LTGEN Coyle hosted a large gathering of Space Chiefs and leaders at the Australian War Memorial with the intention of fostering relationships and building on collaborative efforts to ensure both our access to space and space-based technologies remains assured.

Allies and partners around the world are looking to how we can achieve force multiplying effects at the speed of relevance. This includes leveraging development cycles and minimising NRE – non-reoccurring-engineering. Space is a collaborative domain, where nations can also achieve more through cooperation across various capabilities – as we see in Australia with Space Domain Awareness for example.

When it comes to military satellite communications, resilience and interoperability is key for allies and partners. Collaborating on programs that can also uplift sovereign industry is a focus. For example, we are grateful to be working with Japan and Mitsubishi Electric producing their next-generation of anti-jam communications satellites.

These are capabilities designed with regional considerations at heart, to meet the needs for warfighter today and into the future.

This month saw the launch of Space Vehicle 10, the final satellite of the GPS 3 series built by Lockheed Martin. These satellites offer significantly boosted accuracy, coverage and throughput, mitigating against jamming and interference. GPS 3F is the next series of satellites already under construction. They are designed with even greater anti-jam to counter the rise of EW threats.

I’d hate for you all to take away a degree of doom and gloom from my speech. This is an opportunity to discuss and celebrate Australian space. There are number of world leaders in space in our industrial ecosystem, exporting globally, and contributing across civil, commercial, and military sectors.

Lockheed Martin takes pride in seeking them out and working with them finding paths into our Global Supply Chain. Which late last year we were able to announce that our Office of Australian Industrial Participation surpassed $225m in export contracts with Australian companies – a number being with Space companies.

By way of example, Inovor Technologies out of Adelaide. Who participated in a yearlong Mentor Protégé Program and define what can be achieved in Australian space.

Silentium Defence is another. As is ground segment champion Av-Comm Space & Defence, who along with Blacktree Technology, wave the Australian flag high not just here but around the world.

It would be remiss of me not to mention Gilmour Space, HEO, and Space Machines Company. In short, we truly have some great capabilities, people, and skills in our country to work and partner with in support of space and defence.

Suffice to say, we are proud to be collaborating with them and actively looking for more opportunities with others. I think LM and my Industry peers need to see ourselves as Pime Systems Integrator to continue to build on this approach.

Space is an important capability for Defence and the lives we have become accustomed to living. Given the reliance it is important that we cast our mind to its resilience and the role Defence and Defence industry should play regarding space communications and control into the future.