Onyx Aerospace

For more than a decade now, Onyx Aerospace has been a reliable partner to government and commercial organizations providing the entire spectrum of engineering, program management, and technical support services. The company’s genesis traces back to 2011 when a group of government veterans incepted Onyx as a boutique consulting services firm. They purpose built a HUBZone company that gives back to the community and found a niche market in offering subject matter expertise to government agencies and started developing innovative, professional solutions to fulfill their needs. Coupled with an enthusiastic drive for innovation and its profound domain knowledge, the company has witnessed organic growth since then, gaining a strong foothold in the industry and evolving into a national consulting service with branches across five states. Onyx today serves Huntsville’s Redstone Arsenal, Research Park, and NASA Marshall Space Flight Center with satellite operations in Louisiana, Texas, Washington D.C., and the Florida Space Coast. Owing to this customer base, the company recently relocated its headquarters to Huntsville, Alabama.

Dedicated to providing quality, efficient, and effective solutions, Onyx primarily serves large commercial businesses and offers targeted support to specific government clients. Most customers approach the company with requests to become nimbler and break down the information silos within their organizations to effectively deliver quality results. Onyx embraces virtual communication and other technologies to enable high-end engineering capabilities and accelerate the pace of innovation.

The company renders end-to-end engineering services throughout the entire lifecycle of defense and space programs, including architecture, concept development, and verification, as well as fielding and operations.

“We support customers to realize benefits and faster return of investment by creating efficiencies in schedule, cost, or technical performance,” says Steve Hanna, president of Onyx.

Onyx currently supports multiple programs for Department of Defense organizations and government clients such as NASA, International Space Station (ISS), Space Launch System (SLS), Ballistic Missile Defense, DoD Missile Systems, Advanced Concepts M&S, and Payloads. Delivery of such ingenious services are made possible with the company’s focused approach during client engagement. Onyx begins the projects with an elaborate conversation listening to the client’s pain points. The company gathers information not just about the problems but also regarding silos in tangential programs and markets. Onyx then examines the client’s assumptions to the problem statement and offers services to help them break down the silos and revise the solutions offered. The company is uniquely skilled in providing resources, knowledge, and capabilities of a large company with a small business’s personal service, flexibility, and spirit. This enables Onyx to move through the program’s different phases with ease and deliver results faster.

Also unique to Onyx is its team comprising of highly functional, intelligent, and seasoned subject matter experts. The company heavily focuses on hiring forward-leaning and proficient employees who have extensive domain expertise and understanding of the whole vision of the business.

Illustrating the efficiency of Onyx’s services, Hanna highlights an instance wherein the company helped a large Fortune 500 organization that faced manufacturing and quality control problems, including a program killer scheduling slip. Onyx was thus brought onboard and worked in the factory. By looking at the integrated schedule and goals, the company redesigned the curated schedule flows for efficiency achieving the customer program goals. This also helped the client to realize over two years’ schedule savings while producing a high quality product.

Onyx meticulously tracks advancements in adjacent markets and delivers an extensive portfolio of government services. One innovation trend (example) that the company focuses on is domestic hardware manufacturing with data integration, such as supporting onshoring PPE manufacturing to needs during the COVID-19 crisis or facilitating smart factories through new manufacturing techniques and material sourcing. The company intends to apply these insights from government programs to increase the speed of commercialization “We are looking forward to employing new technologies and accelerating the pace of technology and its adoption across government departments, commercial industries, and non-traditional defense and aerospace users,” concludes Hanna.