HOUSTON, July 24 /EMWNews/ -- The National Aeronautical and Space

Administration (NASA) recently announced it awarded Lockheed Martin (NYSE:

LMT) a one-year contract extension of the Cargo Mission Contract (CMC)

valued at $42 million. The extension provides integration services for

cargo delivery to and from the International Space Station (ISS). The

extension begins Oct. 1, 2008, and is the first of two options in the

original contract.



    "Lockheed Martin CMC has achieved a history of excellent performance

and safety on the Cargo Mission Contract," said Lockheed Martin Vice

President Rick Hieb. "We are pleased to continue offering the ISS Program

the same kind of responsive operations and engineering support that we have

since the beginning of the contract."



    The Lockheed Martin CMC team has a proven history of rapid responses to

the dynamic ISS environment, supporting frequent changes in manifests and

exploring a variety of options to increase up mass on the remaining shuttle

missions. The CMC team also supports the ISS strategy of prepositioning

external Orbital Replacement Units on orbit to ensure operations post

shuttle retirement including design, build and integration of flight

support equipment. Other contract requirements include processing and

exporting cargo for resupply of ISS via international vehicles such as the

Russian Progress and Soyuz, European Space Agency's Automated Transfer

Vehicle, and the planned Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency's first launch

of the H-II Transfer Vehicle.



    In addition to CMC, Lockheed Martin's Houston team has a long history

of providing support to Johnson Space Center. Services include systems

engineering and analysis, control center design, development and

operations, life sciences services, high performance computing center

operations and maintenance, Human in-the-loop simulations, and research and

specialized facilities.



    Headquartered in Bethesda, Md., Lockheed Martin employs about 140,000

people worldwide and is principally engaged in the research, design,

development, manufacture, integration and sustainment of advanced

technology systems, products and services. The Corporation reported 2007

sales of $41.9 billion.