By: Dawn Zoldi
Before the first astronaut ever sets foot on Mars, someone has to build the phone lines. The rockets get the headlines. The rovers get the glory. But without a dedicated, high-capacity communications network orbiting the Red Planet, a crewed Mars mission is little more than an expensive exercise in sending people somewhere they can’t be heard from.
Lockheed Martin has decided it wants to be the company that solves that problem. At the company’s 2026 Space Symposium Media Breakfast held April 13 in Colorado Springs, Whitley Poyser, the company’s Director of Exploration, made a strong case as to why no one else is better positioned to do it.
Half a Century on the Red Planet and Still Clocking In
Of the 22 spacecraft NASA has ever sent to Mars, Lockheed Martin built or developed 11 of them. Every single Mars aeroshell, the heat shield that stands between a spacecraft and a fiery end during entry, descent and landing, has been a Lockheed Martin product. And right now, today, the company operates all three of NASA’s active science orbiters circling Mars.
On April 7, Lockheed Martin marked 25 years of continuous operation of the Mars Odyssey orbiter. The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter hit its 20-year anniversary of Mars orbit insertion this year too. Both spacecraft were designed as science missions. Both outlived their primary objectives by years. Both kept working, relaying data from surface rovers and landers as a kind of bonus service, because Lockheed Martin built them to last in one of the most punishing environments in the solar system.
This July, the company will join NASA in celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Viking 1 landing, the mission that gave humanity its first successful look at the Martian surface. Lockheed Martin was there for that, too.
The Problem Nobody Talks About Enough
For decades, Mars surface assets such as rovers, landers, science instruments scratching at the dirt, have relied on relay communications piggybacked onto science orbiters. It worked well enough for robots. It will not work for humans.
The bandwidth demands of a crewed Mars mission, the need for near-continuous contact, the navigation and positioning requirements, the emergency communications protocols all require something the current patchwork relay network was never designed to provide. Poyser explained that Mars needs infrastructure with telecommunications as its primary mission, not its secondary one.
Last year’s federal budget reconciliation process formalized what the science community had long argued. Dedicated Mars communications infrastructure is a national priority, not a nice-to-have. NASA has since released a draft Request for Proposal (RFP) for a Mars Telecommunications Network. The competition to build it is beginning in earnest, and Lockheed Martin is positioning hard.
“We want to have infrastructure that’s dedicated to the needs of the Martian assets,” Poyser said. The relay era is ending. The infrastructure era has begun.
Artemis II Changed the Conversation
Something historic just happened in deep space. The Artemis II mission, the first crewed flight to the vicinity of the Moon in more than 50 years, demonstrated sustained crew communications beyond Earth orbit. Lockheed Martin provided those communications capabilities.
It was a proof of concept that matters enormously to the Mars telecom argument. Until Artemis II, human-rated deep space communications were largely theoretical. Now they are flight-proven. And the architecture that kept astronauts connected around the Moon, Poyser argued, provides a direct stepping stone to doing the same thing at Mars.
“Through the Artemis II mission and the continuous crew communications, we were able to demonstrate what it actually takes to have extended comms that support crew,” she said. “It’s very necessary to have an extensible Moon-to-Mars capability.”
Lockheed Martin’s decades of work on GPS and positioning, navigation, and timing (PNT) systems feed directly into that capability. Digital signal processing technologies matured for Earth-orbit applications now translate into the kind of deep-space communications toolkit a Mars network demands. “We’ve matured and evolved that technology over time,” Poyser said. “We look forward to applying it to meet NASA’s needs, or in some cases exceed them.”
A $3 Billion Fix for an $11 Billion Problem
Mars Sample Return, the audacious plan to retrieve samples already collected by NASA’s Perseverance rover and bring them to Earth, has become one of the most politically fraught programs in NASA’s portfolio. An independent review board estimated the original architecture would cost between $8 billion and $11 billion. That price tag effectively killed the mission’s momentum. The current administration has shown little appetite to revive it on those terms.
Lockheed Martin has a different number: under $3 billion, firm fixed price.
In 2024, NASA awarded the company a contract to conduct an industry study of the total mission architecture. Lockheed Martin came back with a proposal built around simplicity and proven hardware. It included an InSight-derived lander, a leaner Mars Ascent Vehicle stripped to its core functions and an Earth entry system drawn directly from the OSIRIS-REx asteroid sample return mission, which Lockheed Martin also built and flew successfully. The company has been studying Mars sample return architectures since 1975. (See prior AG coverage of the Mars sample return project).
“We still very much stand behind it,” Poyser said, even as political winds remain uncertain. The samples sitting in Perseverance’s belly right now represent scientifically selected material chosen through a rigorous National Academy process. Getting them to Earth-based labs, where analytical tools exist that simply cannot be replicated on Mars, would mark a generational leap in understanding the planet’s history, and potentially its capacity to have harbored life.
Playing the Long Game
Lockheed Martin’s advantage in any Mars project lies in its ability to build systems that evolve. “When you send something to Mars, we don’t only want to make it static at that time. It needs to be able to upgrade over time,” Poyser said. She pointed to the company’s Ignite research division as the engine feeding next-generation technologies into its deep space programs. (See prior AG coverage of Ignite).
The architecture Lockheed Martin envisions for Mars is not a one-generation solution. It is a platform designed to grow as robotic surface assets proliferate, as sample return hardware arrives and eventually as humans step off a lander and need to call home.
Fifty years ago, Viking 1 sent back the first photographs of a rust-colored plain and a pale pink sky. The world was transfixed. Today, the company that helped make that moment possible is arguing that the next great leap, humans living and working on Mars, runs directly through the infrastructure it wants to build. The Red Planet has always rewarded patience. Lockheed Martin has been patient for half a century. Now it’s ready to launch.