Lockheed Martin Space, headquartered in Denver, Colorado, is one of the largest space defense contractors in the world, employing over sixteen thousand people that develop an impressive range of products from satellites to space probes to missile defense systems.

Currently, Lockheed Martin Space is revolutionizing the way new software is written, tested and deployed to their diverse range of satellites through their SmartSat system. SmartSat provides a standardized format for software applications.

Lockheed Martin Space’s satellites can vary in a few key ways, specifically when it comes to computational hardware, software development kits, and operating systems. Because of this, certain satellites are incompatible with some specialized software.

Our SmartSat Satellite App Store is a web-based marketplace for browsing, uploading, and installing mission-ready applications to live satellites. The SmartSat App Store also includes rigorous software testing that automatically determines what software is compatible with which satellites.

Every new application uploaded to our app store is put through our automated compatibility testing to assess the Lockheed Martin satellites on which the software can be deployed. The test results are sent back to the App Store and displayed for application developers, saving them many hours of rigorous testing.

To ensure reliability, our App Store runs every new piece of software against every possible target hardware on real, physical devices. The ability to test on real hardware instead of simulation offers peace of mind to Lockheed Martin engineers.

The SmartSat Satellite App Store uses SmartSat Defined Services to perform the automated testing on the target hardware. SmartSat Satellites access these services through built-in file servers linked with the Flask back end. The front end of the SmartSat Satellite App Store is built with React.