Lockheed Unveils Satellite Cloud Project; Yvonne Hodge Quoted

Lockheed Martin considers implementing the cloud-based approach in space missions through its two satellite cloud platforms – SpaceCloud and HiveStar, GeekWire reported Wednesday.

Yvonne Hodge, vice president and chief information officer at Lockheed’s space business, unveiled the HiveStar project at Amazon’s re:MARS conference in Las Vegas.

“It’s not just about collecting the data and then sending it back to the ground for processing,” Hodge said of HiveStar. “It’s about analyzing the information in space … and then sending the knowledge, the intelligence back to Earth.”

Hodge said HiveStar could be implemented in low-Earth orbit and deep space environments.

It’s a constellation, but it’s the software-defined aspect of it that makes it a hive,” she said. “It’s not like you replicate the mission in every single satellite, but you can distribute the information in such a way so that if something happened to one, then the others can take over.”