Location · Hampton
IT consulting for Hampton aerospace and research-services firms
NASA Langley sits in your back yard. Your research-services firm runs on grant-funded tooling, scattered repositories, and one engineer who knows where everything is. We document it before they leave.
That paragraph is the page in miniature. The longer version follows.
Local economy snapshot
Hampton is anchored by NASA Langley Research Center and Joint Base Langley-Eustis. NASA Langley is the agency's oldest field center, runs hypersonics research at the Hypersonic Facilities Complex, and is the lead center for advanced air mobility and atmospheric flight research. Joint Base Langley-Eustis sits next door and hosts Air Combat Command headquarters and the 1st Fighter Wing. Around those two installations sits the densest concentration of small aerospace subcontractors, grant-funded research-services firms, federal contractors, and engineering-services shops in the Peninsula. Hampton University is the third anchor and pulls a research-and-grant tail of its own.
A typical Hampton research-services or aerospace-subcontractor firm runs $2M-$30M in revenue with 10-150 employees, holds at least one prime contract with NASA, the Air Force, or a DoD prime that does, and lives on a recognizable stack: Cayuse or InfoEd for grant management, LabArchives or Benchling for electronic lab notebooks, AWS GovCloud or Azure Government for compute, SharePoint with an 800-171 overlay for the document layer. The IT pain is two-shaped: federal compliance plus grant reporting on one side, and the institutional knowledge problem where one senior engineer holds the entire process map in their head on the other.
The landmark we look at on the drive in
The supplier and research-services ecosystem orbiting NASA Langley and Joint Base Langley-Eustis is exactly who we score. Hampton Coliseum and the downtown waterfront are the civic anchors; the airfield-and-research geography is what shapes most of our Pulse calendar from the city.
What we score in a Hampton operator
The CTGA framework scores your business 100-900 across four pillars: Controls, Technology, Growth, Adoption. For a Hampton research-services firm or aerospace subcontractor the weighting tilts to Controls and Adoption first.
The Controls pillar maps your environment against the NIST 800-171 control families because most NASA and DoD prime contracts flow down 800-171 requirements regardless of CMMC level. If you also hold a Level 2 contract requirement, we score CMMC posture alongside. The Technology pillar audits your grant-management stack, your electronic lab notebook deployment, your AWS GovCloud or Azure Government tenant, and the document-management overlay that decides whether your CUI lives in the right bucket. The Growth pillar scores whether your IT posture is ready for the next grant cycle, the next federal contract opportunity, and the multi-PI collaboration that hits when your prime brings on a teaming partner.
The Adoption pillar is where Hampton scoring most often surprises the owner. Research-services firms run on tribal knowledge. The senior engineer who has been with the firm since the first SBIR is the unwritten process documentation. When that person retires, takes a different job, or goes on sabbatical, the firm discovers what the Adoption score has been telling them. We score the institutional-knowledge gap, name the documentation work that closes it, and ride the documentation discipline through the first quarter.
What we score versus what we do not
We score, we name the gaps, and we ride the remediation. We do not run your help desk. We do not write your code. We do not certify CMMC or NIST 800-171 compliance; your C3PAO does that, and your RPO partner signs the official System Security Plan. We do not write your grant proposals; we score the grant-management IT stack that supports them. We do not write your research; we score the lab-notebook and document-management discipline that protects it.
What the engagement looks like at each tier
A typical Hampton research-services firm or aerospace subcontractor with 20-150 employees and a federal contract cycle running lives in Helix Engagement. At Engagement we come in as your IT squad, close the gaps the Pulse score named, and ride the rollout. For Hampton operators the rollout work usually includes the documentation discipline: the process maps your senior engineer holds in their head get written down, the runbooks the lab manager carries on a clipboard become living documents, and the institutional-knowledge gap shrinks one quarter at a time. Quarterly re-score with written delta.
Helix Operate is the embedded seat for $10M+ Hampton operators carrying a real ops bottleneck, multiple active grants, a CMMC Level 2 deadline inside 12 months, or an M&A diligence process where the acquirer is reading your federal compliance posture before they read your P&L.
Helix Pulse Retainer is the light-touch advisory tier for owner-operators who scored above 400 on the Pulse, have their primary compliance posture in shape, and want a steady hand on the quarterly re-score. The lab-manager-turned-CTO who is approaching retirement is the canonical Pulse Retainer Hampton operator.
We are sixty minutes from your hangar
Hampton, Newport News, Norfolk, Virginia Beach, Chesapeake, Portsmouth, and Suffolk are sixty minutes apart at most. We come to you when it makes sense and we run on Zoom when it does not.
Services Hampton operators pull on most
How we engage in Hampton.
- CMMC Readiness
For aerospace subcontractors and research-services firms feeding NASA Langley, Joint Base Langley-Eustis, or any DoD prime carrying CMMC flow-down. We score your CMMC posture on the Controls pillar (0-225), write the gap list ranked by what it costs you on the audit floor, and ride remediation to the C3PAO. We score; your C3PAO certifies.
- CIO Services
The CIO seat for a multi-grant research-services firm or a growing aerospace subcontractor. The function that reads the contract before you sign, sits at the leadership table when the call lands, and writes the 12-month roadmap your CFO can defend. The function without the $260,000-$310,000 first-year cost of filling it full-time.
- IT Audit
The stack audit for research-services firms running 60+ SaaS subscriptions across grant management, lab notebooks, document management, computing, and the project-tracking layer. We score what each tool is paying for, rank the rationalization opportunities, and name the contracts that can fund the documentation discipline out of license savings.
Industries we serve in Hampton
The clusters we work in Hampton.
- Government Contracting
The NASA Langley adjacency is the densest concentration of grant-funded research-services firms in Hampton Roads. Cayuse, InfoEd, LabArchives, Benchling, AWS GovCloud, the 800-171 document overlay, and the institutional-knowledge gap that hides under all of it.
Questions
The things Hampton operators ask.
No. NASA Langley adjacents are the densest concentration, but Joint Base Langley-Eustis defense suppliers, Hampton University research-and-grant partners, professional services firms in the downtown core, and a smaller tail of healthcare and trades operators also show up on the Pulse calendar.
We score the IT posture that supports those programs. We do not perform classified work, we do not hold a facility clearance, and we do not handle classified material. For ITAR and CUI work we score the environment, the boundary, and the controls; the formal export-control compliance and the cleared-handler scope sits with your existing compliance vendor.
No. Helix Stax scores CMMC readiness on the Controls pillar of the CTGA framework. We do not perform official RPO assessment work and we are not a C3PAO. Your RPO partner signs the System Security Plan; your C3PAO certifies.
Yes. That stack is the canonical Hampton engagement. We map what talks to what across grant management, lab notebook, and document store, score whether the 800-171 overlay is operating as documented, and rank the rebuild work by what each gap costs you in audit risk or grant-reporting friction.
The Pulse is free. The Pulse Retainer starts at $1,500-$3,500 per month for light-touch advisory. Helix Engagement runs higher and includes the squad-level documentation and remediation work most research-services and aerospace-subcontractor operators land in. Pricing bands are published.
Yes. Hampton is inside the sixty-minute drive radius. The Pulse is in-person if you want it that way, and we encourage on-site for research-services engagements because the institutional-knowledge gap lives in the lab and the project-room, not in the back office.
We serve all seven Hampton Roads cities: Hampton, Newport News, Norfolk, Virginia Beach, Chesapeake, Portsmouth, and Suffolk. The Pulse is in-person across that radius.
See how we'd score a Hampton operator
Sixty minutes, free, in person if you are in Hampton. You leave with your CTGA score, the three gaps that cost you the most on the next grant cycle or the next contract option year, and a written read on which retainer tier fits your operator profile. No pitch on the call. Whether you support NASA Langley, Joint Base Langley-Eustis, a DoD prime three tiers up, or a federally-funded research consortium, the conversation is the same. We score, we name the gaps, you decide what happens next.
60 minutes · Free · You walk out with your top three gaps written down