Work is underway near Denver, Colo., on a 266,000-square-foot, $350 million facility for Lockheed Martin that will produce next-generation satellites.

The Gateway Center, slated for completion in 2020, includes a high bay clean room capable of building a spectrum of satellites from micro to macro. The company says the facility's paperless, digitally enabled production environment will incorporate rapidly-reconfigurable production lines and advanced test capability.

The facility includes a thermal vacuum chamber to simulate the environment of space, an anechoic chamber to test sensors and communications systems, and a test operations and analysis center. The Gateway Center will be certified to security standards required to support national security missions.

Lockheed Martin's Waterton Canyon campus southwest of Denver has been a hub of space innovation since the 1950s, with more than 4,000 employees and a wide range of design, manufacturing and test facilities on site. Spacecraft currently in production at the site include the Air Force's GPS III satellites, NASA's InSight Mars lander, NOAA's GOES-R Series weather satellites and commercial communications satellites.

Companies selected by Lockheed Martin for the project include Hensel Phelps as the general contractor, Matrix PDM Engineering and Dynavac for thermal vacuum chamber design and construction, and ETS-Lindgren for anechoic chamber design and construction.