Lockheed Martin's Grand Prairie Missiles Unit on Target With Major Contracts, Top Exec's Relocation

Inside Lockheed Martin’s sprawling seven-building campus in Grand Prairie, there are small rooms where Star Wars posters share space with workshop-like desks cluttered with Raspberry Pi devices, 3D printers and reels of raw plastics ready to be melted down and turned into models.Frank St. John, a 52-year-old Lockheed lifer who’s risen from intern to top executive, describes the rooms as a “sand box.” He points to large computer monitors running the same software used by top film and video game production studios. On one screen, a life-like animation of one of the company’s signature missiles deploys from a battleship, identifies and sinks its target.Here, teams of highly educated and skilled engineers step away from their traditionally secure environments and get creative, putting the latest commercial technology to use in dreaming up more efficient ways to build the missiles, rockets and sensors used to keep world peace.These innovation labs are part of St. John’s new domain at Lockheed Martin’s Missiles and Fire Control headquarters in Grand Prairie, a rapidly growing division of the aerospace giant that’s often overshadowed in Dallas-Fort Worth by its bigger sibling, which assembles F-35 fighter jets.  Continue reading...