Working with Aerospace Clients

Booz Allen Hamilton’s work for aerospace companies extends from the leading edge of space exploration to general commercial aviation. In 2006, we worked with the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) helping prepare missions to space, and we provided expertise to improve the manufacture and launch of satellites. We advised major airframe manufacturers as well as major airlines. It is an ever-fluid market, where Booz Allen’s unique expertise and objectivity are deeply valued.

Booz Allen is supporting two of the U.S. federal government’s most complex and high-profile space initiatives:

• Constellation Program
• Transformational Satellite Communications

For NASA’s Constellation Program, which aims to send manned expeditions to the moon and Mars, we are helping develop program architecture, engineering processes, and infrastructure. “We have the opportunity to help NASA transform itself from an operations model, running the International Space Station and the space shuttle, to an explorations-focused agency,” says Tom Moorman, a vice president based in McLean. Booz Allen’s relationship with NASA is more than two decades old, having begun in the 1980s with systems engineering, information technology systems, and program management support for the International Space Station and support for NASA communications systems.

The Transformational Satellite (TSAT) Communications System, which is sponsored by the U.S. Air Force, will address the military’s need to provide warfighters with secure, high-bandwidth, space-based, Internet-like access and connectivity. As the systems engineering and integration contractor, Booz Allen is defining the system requirements and integrating the satellite and ground subsystems, which are being acquired separately. “The work we are doing will transform the infrastructure that military commanders and warfighters use to access time-critical information globally,” says Sam Porgess, a vice president in Los Angeles.

One example of our broad work in commercial aviation in 2006 was with the Cessna Aircraft Company, which saw its first airplane take off on August 13, 1927, and which first engaged Booz Allen on an assignment in 1952. In 2006 we aided the company in its analysis of a proposed product strategy.

“Cessna turned to Booz Allen a half century later for the same reasons it had originally called on us: for a highly objective, independent perspective on a major decision,” says John Niehaus, a principal based in Los Angeles. “We helped inform Cessna’s investment decisions as it was considering a new product by providing rigorous, leading-edge quantitative research to forecast market demand.”

Half a world away, in the Middle East, Booz Allen has been helping Saudi Arabian Airlines define a master design for its information technology systems and develop a strategic and financial plan to help the airline, the largest in the region, take advantage of growth opportunities in all the markets it serves.

story posted August 2007