Lockheed Martin is hiring engineers and leasing a new building as it aims to hit the ground running on the design of NASA's next-generation Orion spacecraft.

Lockheed Martin Space Systems in Jefferson County, which landed the $8.2 billion Orion contract in late August, has 250 or more employees already on the job here. That's up from the 150 who initially drafted Lockheed's winning bid for NASA.

And Lockheed has leased a four-story building in the southwest metro area encompassing about 140,000 square feet to house the 600 employees who ultimately will work on designing Orion.

"The work we have going on here in Denver is cutting-edge design work," Patrick McKenzie, Lockheed's business development manager for the Orion project, told a symposium sponsored by the Colorado Space Business Roundtable.

The spacecraft is slated to return humans to the moon for the first time since the Apollo program in 1972 and later ferry humans to Mars.

The design facility is near the intersection of South Wadsworth Boulevard and West Hampden Avenue. Lockheed is eyeing the possibility of leasing a second building nearby that could accommodate more employees involved in human spaceflight work.

"That's not a done deal," McKenzie said of the second building in an interview with the Rocky Mountain News.

He added that "it makes good business sense to co-locate" as many Lockheed employees as possible who are involved in human spaceflight projects.

After landing the Orion project, Lockheed Martin Space Systems opted to consolidate all its human spaceflight activities into one line of business.

Lockheed officials are hiring engineers, planners, finance types and others.

McKenzie said the company expects to be at the 600-employee level by late 2007 or early 2008.

The company plans to begin moving into the South Wadsworth facility by March.

"We should be done by early summer - June at the latest," McKenzie said of the move.

The company had previously leased the building years ago for different work.

Looking ahead, McKenzie said that in two to three years 3,000 to 3,500 people around the country will be involved in the design and manufacture of Orion. The company is working with a variety of subcontractors.

The new spacecraft will be deployed after NASA retires the space shuttle in 2010. NASA has said it wants Orion's first manned flight to the international space station to occur in September 2014.

The spacecraft's first lunar flight is scheduled for no later than 2020.

Orion will resemble an oversized, bell-shaped Apollo capsule. The 66-foot-long spacecraft will accommodate four astronauts during a moon mission and six crew members for flights to the international space station and Mars.

Lockheed has parceled out its work on the project to employees around the country.

Lockheed's main hub of operations for building Orion is in Houston, where the company is co-located with NASA's Johnson Space Center.

Lockheed officials plan to perform final assembly and testing on Orion at Florida's Kennedy Space Center. The company plans to build large "structural" components at facilities in Michoud, La.

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