The relationship

NASA Aeronautics is coordinating the biggest change to national airspace since the jet age — electric air taxis, autonomous cargo, corridors that manage themselves. NARI sits at the center of that effort: an aeronautics hub with its hands in cross-agency work, from the FAA to universities to industry.

Since 2018, the institute’s public-facing digital infrastructure has been designed, built, and operated from one studio. None of it was won in a bid. Program leads ask for the team by name — and as the contracts around the work have changed hands, the ask has stayed the same. The engagement widens the way it began: one program, one request, at a time.

The platforms

The AAM Working Groups Portal has run continuously since 2020 — 2,000+ members across four working groups, with registration, file exchange, and 120+ hybrid events bridging internal NASA Teams calls to public streams, roughly 150 of them recorded and searchable.

Sky for All took the systems-engineering model behind NASA’s mid-century airspace vision and made it something the public could actually read, respond to, and shape — wildfire response, rural healthcare, hundreds of stakeholder responses. The input culminated in a white paper presented to Congress.

The broadcasts

imaginAviation — the flagship annual broadcast of NASA’s Transformative Aeronautics Concepts Program — reached 2,000+ attendees per show across 150+ countries. Fully branded live television: green-room feeds routed backstage, pre-records cut live, custom registration issuing boarding passes, watch parties checking in across the U.S. Never a bare screen share.

The same broadcast craft runs the University Leadership Initiative’s annual applicant workshops. The work earned a 2022 NASA Honor Award — the agency’s highest — for enhancing collaborative virtual environments for NASA Aeronautics.

How it runs

Underneath the visible work sits the machinery: registration systems, content management, newsletter automation built from event data, even the design and AV spec of NARI’s own collaboration spaces. All of it inside NASA-approved cloud infrastructure — compliance as table stakes, not a line item.

Multi-year continuity changes what gets built. Institutional memory lives in the codebase, not a handover document. When a working group needs a new capability, the conversation starts at the solution — the context is already loaded. NARI’s associate director put it in writing: an indispensable asset to operations.