Northrop Grumman will deliver the Advanced EHF payloads to the system prime contractor, Lockheed Martin Space Systems, Sunnyvale, Calif. Lockheed Martin is currently under contract to provide the first two Advanced EHF satellites and command control system.

Approximately 40 employees already are at work in the facility. Plans call for as many as 200 employees to be based there when full-up payload testing is underway in 2005.

"It has taken more than two years of planning and construction to complete the facility and we are well on our way to delivering the Flight 1 Advanced EHF payload to Lockheed Martin in December 2005," said Clayton Kau, Northrop Grumman Space Technology vice president and Advanced EHF payload program manager.

"The next step is to complete our Advanced EHF payload test set by the end of this year so we can start integrating subsystem hardware and software into a complete payload engineering model early next year. This step will be followed closely with the integration and test of the Advanced EHF flight payload."

Northrop Grumman Space Technology is developing the satellite communications payloads for the system, which will deliver secure, high-speed, network-centric communications to national, strategic and tactical users, as well as international partners.

The Advanced EHF program will provide the military's next generation of highly secure communications satellites and its accompanying ground system. Advanced EHF is a follow-on to the Milstar satellite system. The Milstar II satellite communications network supported military operations during Operation Iraqi Freedom by providing secure transmission of critical targeting information and ground forces command and control data.

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