Lockheed Martin Corporation
Aerospace & DefenseFounded 1995- Updated June 2026
Reviewed by Swet Parvadiya
Last reviewed: June 2026
CorpDigest
Lockheed Martin Corporation
Company History
Founded 1995 in Bethesda, Maryland
Last reviewed: 2026-06-03 · By Swet Parvadiya
Lockheed Martin Corporation is a Aerospace & Defense company with $71.0B in 2024 revenue and 122K employees worldwide. Lockheed Martin Corporation occupies a position in the American economy and national security architecture that has no precise parallel. It is simultaneously a publicly traded company answerable to shareholders, a quasi-governmental institution answerable to Congress and the Pentagon, and a repository of classified technical knowledge answerable to the national interest. These competing obligations shape every aspect of how the company is run — from its conservative financial management style and disciplined capital allocation to its decades-long program relationships with customers who cannot simply take their business elsewhere. The company's four business segments — Aeronautics, Missiles and Fire Control, Rotary and Mission Systems, and Space — serve as the industrial backbone of American military capability across every domain: air, land, sea, space, and cyber. When a U.S. Navy destroyer launches a missile to intercept a ballistic threat, the combat management system coordinating that engagement was almost certainly built by Lockheed Martin. When a U.S. Army unit calls for precision rocket fire, the HIMARS system delivering it was built by Lockheed Martin. When a GPS signal guides a self-driving car through an intersection, the satellite transmitting that signal was built by Lockheed Martin. This extraordinary breadth of national security integration creates a business that is genuinely difficult to evaluate using conventional analytical frameworks. Revenue growth is a function not of market expansion in the commercial sense but of Congressional appropriations, defense budget priorities, and geopolitical threat perceptions. Margins are a function of program execution discipline rather than pricing power. And competitive positioning is determined as much by classified technical reputation as by publicly observable capabilities. Understanding Lockheed Martin requires understanding all of these dimensions simultaneously.
Norman Augustine was the chief architect of the 1995 merger between Lockheed Corporation and Martin Marietta that created Lockheed Martin Corporation, serving as the combined company's first Chairman and CEO. Born in 1935 in Denver, Colorado, Augustine earned a bachelor's and master's degree in aerospace engineering from Princeton University before joining the Douglas Aircraft Company and subsequently the Department of Defense as a civilian official. His tenure at Martin Marietta, which began in 1977, transformed the company from a struggling aerospace and construction materials conglomerate into a focused defense and space systems integrator. Augustine's primary strategic insight — that the post-Cold War defense budget environment would require dramatic consolidation among American defense contractors — proved prescient and directly motivated the Lockheed-Martin Marietta merger. After retiring from Lockheed Martin's chairmanship in 1997, he served on numerous corporate boards and government advisory committees, including chairing the Review of U.S. Human Spaceflight Plans Committee in 2009.
Daniel Tellep was Chairman and CEO of Lockheed Corporation at the time of its merger with Martin Marietta in 1995, making him one of the two principal architects of what became the world's largest defense contractor. He joined Lockheed in 1960 as an engineer working on the Polaris submarine-launched ballistic missile program — one of the Cold War's most consequential defense programs — and rose through the company's technical and management ranks over three decades. As CEO from 1989 to 1995, Tellep navigated Lockheed through the post-Cold War defense budget collapse, executing significant workforce reductions, consolidating facilities, and maintaining the F-22 Raptor development program as the company's primary long-term strategic asset. His partnership with Norman Augustine in negotiating and structuring the Lockheed-Martin Marietta merger was instrumental in persuading the Clinton administration to approve the transaction despite antitrust concerns. Tellep stepped back from executive leadership shortly after the merger closed, with Augustine assuming primary leadership of the combined company.
Allan and Malcolm Loughead complete their first seaplane, the Model G, in a rented Santa Barbara garage, charging $10 per passenger for brief flights over San Francisco Bay and launching what would eventually become Lockheed Corporation.
Lockheed establishes the Advanced Development Projects division — universally known as the Skunk Works — under the leadership of Clarence 'Kelly' Johnson, producing the P-80 Shooting Star jet fighter in just 143 days and launching a legacy of classified breakthrough aircraft development.
The Lockheed U-2 high-altitude reconnaissance aircraft completes its first flight, entering CIA service the following year and providing critical intelligence on Soviet military capabilities throughout the Cold War — as well as sparking an international incident when Francis Gary Powers was shot down over the USSR in 1960.
The Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird strategic reconnaissance aircraft achieves first flight, eventually setting an absolute speed record of 2,193 mph for a manned air-breathing aircraft — a record that stands to this day — while providing strategic reconnaissance capabilities that no adversary could intercept.
Lockheed's F-117 Nighthawk stealth attack aircraft makes its combat debut in Operation Desert Storm, striking hardened Iraqi targets with precision-guided munitions and demonstrating to the world that stealth technology had fundamentally altered the calculus of air warfare.
Lockheed Corporation and Martin Marietta complete their $10 billion merger on March 15, 1995, creating Lockheed Martin Corporation with combined revenues of approximately $23 billion, approximately 170,000 employees, and a portfolio spanning fighter aircraft, missiles, satellites, and space systems.
Lockheed Martin wins the Joint Strike Fighter competition against Boeing, securing the System Development and Demonstration contract for what would become the F-35 Lightning II — a program that has since grown into the most expensive weapons system in history with an estimated $1.76 trillion lifecycle cost.
Lockheed Martin's first GPS IIR-M modernized satellite is launched, beginning the upgrade of the GPS constellation with military signals on a second frequency and laying the groundwork for the GPS III program that would follow.
Lockheed Martin completes the acquisition of Sikorsky Aircraft from United Technologies Corporation for approximately $9 billion, adding the UH-60 Black Hawk, CH-53K King Stallion, and S-92 commercial helicopter programs and substantially expanding the company's rotary wing and mission systems capabilities.
The F-35A conventional takeoff and landing variant achieves Initial Operating Capability with the U.S. Air Force, marking the culmination of 15 years of development and the beginning of a production and sustainment cycle expected to generate revenues for the company through the 2070s.
The M142 HIMARS High Mobility Artillery Rocket System, produced by Lockheed Martin, is supplied to Ukrainian forces and achieves immediate strategic impact, destroying Russian ammunition depots, command posts, and logistics nodes at ranges previously unavailable to Ukrainian ground forces, triggering a surge in global demand for Lockheed Martin missile systems.
Lockheed Martin reports fiscal year 2024 net sales of $71.0 billion, a 5.3 percent increase from 2023, driven by growth across all four segments and reflecting unprecedented global demand for the company's defense systems in an environment shaped by the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East and accelerating Chinese military modernization.
Lockheed Martin acquired Sikorsky Aircraft from United Technologies Corporation in November 2015 for approximately $9 billion to add a market-leading rotary wing capability to its portfolio, filling a gap that had limited the company's participation in Army aviation programs. Sikorsky's position as the sole producer of the UH-60 Black Hawk and the prime contractor for the CH-53K King Stallion heavy-lift helicopter provided immediate revenue and a multi-decade sustainment franchise. The acquisition also brought Sikorsky's S-92 commercial offshore transport helicopter, providing a foothold in the civilian helicopter market that offered some diversification from pure defense revenues.
Lockheed Martin announced in December 2020 a $4.4 billion agreement to acquire Aerojet Rocketdyne, the primary U.S. Manufacturer of solid rocket motors and liquid propulsion systems used in virtually all of Lockheed Martin's missile and space programs. The strategic rationale was straightforward: Aerojet Rocketdyne supplied propulsion systems to both Lockheed Martin and its competitors, and ownership would provide supply chain security, reduce propulsion costs, and capture the margins currently flowing to an independent supplier. The acquisition also reflected concerns about the health and capacity of the U.S. Solid rocket motor industrial base, which supplies propellant for weapons systems ranging from Minuteman ICBMs to Javelin missiles.
Lockheed Martin completed the acquisition of Terran Orbital Corporation in 2024 for approximately $450 million, adding a small satellite manufacturing capability that addresses growing DoD and intelligence community demand for proliferated low-Earth orbit satellite architectures. The Space Force and NRO have been shifting from a small number of large, expensive satellites toward large constellations of smaller, cheaper satellites that are more resilient to adversary anti-satellite attacks — a trend that required Lockheed Martin to develop high-volume satellite manufacturing capability that its existing Space segment lacked. Terran Orbital, based in Irvine, California, had developed streamlined manufacturing processes capable of producing small satellites at significantly higher rates than traditional defense satellite manufacturing approaches.
In a complex reverse merger transaction in 2016, Lockheed Martin transferred its Information Systems and Global Solutions business — which provided IT services, healthcare IT, and intelligence analysis to government customers — to Leidos Holdings (formerly SAIC) in a deal valued at approximately $4.6 billion. Rather than a conventional acquisition, this was a Reverse Morris Trust transaction in which Lockheed Martin shareholders received Leidos stock and the combined entity operated under the Leidos name. The transaction allowed Lockheed Martin to exit a business that management viewed as lower-margin and strategically peripheral to the company's core focus on advanced defense systems and technologies.