Joanne Maguire’s father, a retired aerospace executive, didn’t think she was “tough enough” for all of the rigors of a top leadership position in aerospace.
As a girl she had a natural aptitude for math but decided in college to switch majors to engineering. She went to work in the aerospace industry and gradually worked her way up through management.
“He’s told me more than once that he didn’t think I was tough enough for this kind of job,” she said.
To the surprise of her father, Maguire, 52, is now executive vice president of Lockheed Martin’s Jefferson County-based Space Systems Co. She is Lockheed’s highest-ranking female executive, overseeing about 19,000 employees nationally.
She’s proven her mettle.
“In any business there are cycles when the business goes up and business goes down,” Maguire said. “There are times when you have to deliver difficult news. … It’s painful to have to deal with some of those circumstances.”
Shortly after Maguire was promoted to her current position in July, the Space Systems unit won a landmark contract to develop NASA’s Orion crew exploration vehicle, the successor to the space shuttle.
About 800 employees around the country are already working on Orion, including about 170 in Colorado.
A Northrop Grumman-Boeing team had been seen as the favorite, but Lockheed won.
NASA publicly expressed dissatisfaction with Lockheed’s original design. That forced Lockheed to go back to the drawing board and “may have led to a bit of complacency on the part of our competition and then ultimately (may) have worked to our advantage,” Maguire said.
Lockheed said beforehand it would spread out the work, with program headquarters in Houston and other Orion work in Florida, Colorado and Louisiana.
That decision may have helped Lockheed win broad-based support, given that jobs in those states tied to the previous shuttle program could transfer to Orion.
Another achievement under Maguire’s watch was government clearance for the Lockheed-Boeing United Launch Alliance, to be based in Jefferson County. As part of the deal, Boeing engineers and managers from Huntington Beach, Calif., will be asked to move to the rocket venture’s headquarters in Jefferson County.
Maguire said the company will be pleased if two-thirds of about 800 Boeing employees accept the offer. Lockheed’s rocket assembly will move from Jefferson County to Decatur, Ala., but only a couple dozen of those jobs will transfer, she said.
Major projects in the works for the future include GPS III, a new satellite navigation system; the Transformation Communications Satellite system; and the next version of Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites.
Staff writer Kelly Yamanouchi can be reached at 303-954-1488 or kyamanouchi@denverpost.com.
