As a global aerospace and defense company Orbital ATK (was Orbital Sciences) is involved in the manufacture of spaceflight systems and other space systems and components that are marketed to various customers around the world. This includes clients involved with the International space station, the US space program, military organization, commercial space businesses, civilian businesses, and others.

The company, which is based in the US, develops and markets a wide range of space products that include:

1. Space launch vehicles used to launch payloads
2. Propulsion systems for space launch vehicles and spacecraft
3. Aerospace structures used in the development of launch vehicles
4. Commercial, national security, and scientific satellites
5. Space components used in satellites

Orbital ATK is also one of the leading providers of various space services, which include:

1. Commercial resupply services for the International Space Station
2. Technical space services – engineering, manufacturing, project management, program management, etc

Logo & Branding

The space themed logo Orbital ATK uses to represent its brand consists of the company name in an italic bespoke type-face and a graphic of two parabolic arcs. Oddly, the graphic often includes a cross and a triangle, which can be seen in on pages such as this. Despite this slight inconsistency, the logo is usually depicted in blue or white, depending on the background color and works well as a simple graphic that focuses on the company’s work in space rather than defence and weapon manufacturing.

Layout & Content

Because Orbital ATK (like Lockheed Martin and Boeing) offer products and services in a range of sectors, the site navigation does well to separate these off. However, because the secondary drop-down menu area only has room for a few items, the web designer has had to squeeze an entire list of the company’s services into a single listing page (if you can find it) linked to from the footer area. Layout is very basic and most pages contain similar elements of a header image, thumbnail images and standard text blocks for each product or service.

Usability & SEO

Because the http urls have not been redirected to the new https ones and because the site has been coded to generate both a regular url and a default.aspx url for each page, Google has to guess which is the correct one to display in the search results. This usually forces the search engine to share the page authority, and ranking power between these 4 versions of the same page. See and example of this easy to avoid duplicate content issue on all 1, 2, 3, and 4 pages for the Antares launch vehicle.

Site Stats – 2017

Call to Action

Despite offering a products and services similar to Lockheed Martin and Boeing, Orbital ATK have chosen to keep links to the business related parts of the site down in the footer. There you can also find the standard social media links, but no real attempt to encourage visitors to take any particular action.