Officials of Lockheed Martin announced today that its Consolidated Space Operations Contract (CSOC) and SpaceData International (SDI) have successfully provided commercial data services to the oil, gas and energy industry using NASA's space and ground assets. Under the CSOC contract, Lockheed Martin is authorized to sell available K-Band satellite capacity to commercial customers as long as there is no commercial alternative.

The offering of this technology will be announced at the Offshore Technology Conference (OTC), held April 30-May 3, 2001, at Reliant Park in Houston, Texas. CSOC, with partners Space Data International and SkyComm International, will be located at the SPACEHAB booth 3401.

SDI has been conducting a demonstration program with WesternGeco for the past six months transmitting on a daily basis raw seismic exploration data files from a vessel off the coast of Brazil. The data is transmitted over a constellation of NASA communications satellites, to a NASA ground station at White Sands New Mexico and on to an SDI data server. It is then sent by fiber directly into the WesternGeco processing center in Houston.

This service, named SeismicStar, is an automatic point-to-point turnkey service for the oil and gas industry. At 311 megabits per second, the SDI SeismicStar service is believed to be the fastest satellite transmission capability in the world by a commercial entity. A typical daily 100-gigabyte file can be transmitted in less than an hour from a disk on the ship to a disk in the processing center. To use this capacity, SpaceData has been successful in obtaining licenses from the FCC for the marine seismic exploration application. Lockheed Martin and SDI have signed a long-term contract for the SDI use of a portion of the available capacity on NASA's Space Network.

Because of the very large transponder bandwidth and the unique design of the TDRSS satellites, to date only NASA has the capability to provide these point-to-point global services via geostationary TDRSS Ku/Ka-Band satellites. The TDRSS satellites, via their pointing and tracking capability, can reach virtually anywhere in the world except the extreme North Pole and South Pole areas. Licensing by commercial users with the FCC for the commercial use of these NASA TDRSS government frequency satellites is necessary.

"The ability to offer these services to a company supporting the energy industry is truly remarkable," said Dan Heimerdinger, director of CSOC's Office of Commercialization. "Instead of taking months to transport information from remote locations, it can now typically be transported virtually instantaneously, saving a tremendous amount of time, workforce and money."

"SpaceData is very pleased to partner with Lockheed Martin for the use of the TDRSS to support the oil and gas industry. We believe that the SeismicStar service has the ability to revolutionize the seismic exploration data gathering and processing cycle," said Frank Van Rensselaer, chief executive officer of SpaceData International.

"This unique commercial application of available NASA space and ground assets supports the NASA policy to commercialize where it makes sense and not compete with the private sector," stated Stan Newberry, NASA director of Space Operations.

CSOC is a $3-billion-plus contract awarded by NASA to Lockheed Martin, who serves as the prime contractor to provide end-to-end space operations Mission and Data Services to both NASA and non-NASA customers. CSOC manages the majority of NASA's data collection, telemetry and communications operations that support Earth-orbiting satellites, planetary exploration, and human space flight activities. Services include data acquisition from spacecraft, data transmission to end-users, data processing and storage, ground and space communications, and mission control center operations.

CSOC is part of Lockheed Martin Space Operations (LMSO), a business unit of Lockheed Martin Technology Services headquartered in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. LMSO, a high-tech engineering and science services firm, employs about 4,000 engineers, scientists and support personnel. Services include managing CSOC; software and hardware engineering for the Space Shuttle and International Space Station; mission operations and planning systems design, development, and integration; and human life sciences research.

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SOURCE: Consolidated Space Operations Contract and SpaceData International