Martin Marietta

It was putting up satellites, and it was, and it seemed to be geared more toward commercial, which as a pro capitalist, I was thinking, "That's a good trend.

There's gonna be some Martin Marietta, Lockheed Martin, others, Northrop Grumman.

They, they have to be making money doing this." Is it fair to say that that was the segue, even though we haven't gone to Mars, even though we haven't gone back to the moon, isn't that a segue to what I would call the commercialization of space? We're shifting now to space away from nuclear, um, that we see now in SpaceX or Blue Origin or Virgin Galactic.

I- I- was that a good...

Um-

It's interesting.

It's interesting 'cause wouldn't you agree that's exactly why Apollo succeeded? It did begin as a national purpose focused thing, but they definitely didn't use government engine- and they used MIT and they used Martin Marietta and Lockheed.

They used Raytheon, or they used the private sector, as you call them, vendors.

And in this case, that means going back over a century to two separate origin stories that eventually merged into one giant.

That's right, Sarah, because Lockheed Martin is actually the product of two distinct corporate lineages, Lockheed and Martin Marietta, that only formally merged in 1995.

So let's start with the older thread, the Lockheed side, which is one of the most romantic founding stories in American aviation.

Set the scene for us.

In 1993, Lockheed acquired General Dynamics' Fort Worth division, which was the home of F-16 production.

That was a pivotal move.

Then in 1995 came the defining transaction, the merger of Lockheed Corporation and Martin Marietta to create Lockheed Martin.

Martin Marietta itself had already been on an acquisition spree, having absorbed General Electric's aerospace division in 1992 and General Dynamics' space systems business.