From a $4 Million SBA Loan to a $317 Million NASA Prime Contract

A Huntsville small business that started with four employees just became a prime contractor at the NASA center where it once worked in the background.

By Carry and Conquer Publications

In August 2026, a joint venture called Arrow's Edge won a $317 million NASA contract to run engineering, environmental and utilities operations across Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. One half of that venture is Seabrook Solutions, a Native American and woman-owned small business that Lang Sims took over as CEO in 2014, when the company had four employees and a business plan built on a single SBA-backed loan. Twelve years later, Sims and co-owner Craig Seabrook are running a joint venture that just became NASA's prime contractor for facility operations at Marshall, in the same building where Seabrook Solutions started out as a subcontractor.

The subcontract that became a strategy

Seabrook Solutions was founded in Huntsville in 2012 by Craig Seabrook, and Sims stepped in as CEO in 2014, when the company was projecting roughly $4 million in revenue on four employees. The company's first capital came from an SBA-backed loan in 2013, used to establish operations, chase early federal work and build the internal systems a government contractor needs before it can bid competitively. That same year, Seabrook Solutions began its relationship with Amentum, then still operating as AECOM Management Services, through a subcontract supporting facility operations at NASA Marshall.

The relationship stayed a subcontract for over a decade. Seabrook Solutions used that time to work through two more SBA programs: the Emerging Leaders Program in 2019, which the company credits with shaping its long-term growth strategy, and the SBA's Mentor-Protege Program in 2020, which let Seabrook Solutions formally partner with a larger mentor firm to go after work it could not have won alone. By 2019, five years into Sims's tenure, the company had grown to six locations, three prime contracts and 45 employees, on track to cross $4 million in revenue that year, according to the company's own account of the milestone.

The mentor-protege structure is what turned the Amentum relationship into Arrow's Edge, the joint venture that now holds the NASA prime contract. Under SBA rules, a mentor-protege joint venture lets a small firm team with an established contractor to bid on work neither could realistically pursue solo, while the small firm keeps its size status and set-aside eligibility. For Seabrook Solutions, this is the exact mechanism that took a company subcontracting under Amentum at Marshall and turned it, twelve years later, into a co-prime on a $317 million award at the same site.

What Arrow's Edge actually won

The contract is the Facilities Operations and Maintenance Support Services II award, known as FOMSS II, a five-year deal covering comprehensive operations and maintenance support for facilities and collateral equipment across Marshall Space Flight Center. The scope spans engineering, environmental management, monitoring systems, buildings and structures, and utilities and mechanical systems, the work that keeps a NASA center's physical infrastructure running behind the science and engineering that gets the headlines.

The award is expected to add roughly 100 employees to Seabrook Solutions, pushing its nationwide workforce past 450. Craig Seabrook, president and co-owner of the company, said the firm currently supports five NASA centers as a subcontractor, but FOMSS II marks its first NASA prime contract, and it is landing in the company's hometown. Sims called the award a "full-circle moment" for the Amentum partnership, tracing a direct line from the 2014 subcontract to the 2026 prime.

A track record that predates the NASA win

The NASA contract did not appear out of nowhere. Seabrook Solutions has spent the past several years building a federal contracting portfolio well beyond Marshall. In 2022, the company competed for task orders under a $49 million U.S. Army Corps of Engineers contract for facility quality assurance work, one of several defense-side awards that built out its operations and maintenance track record outside NASA. Arrow's Edge itself is not new: the joint venture previously won a three-year, $200 million IDIQ contract to maintain aviation support equipment for the U.S. Navy's Fleet Readiness Centers, awarded through a competition reserved specifically for 8(a) small businesses.

That accumulated track record is part of why Sims was named Alabama's Small Business Person of the Year by the SBA in 2026, an honor that made her the state's nominee for the agency's national award. The SBA's own account of the nomination credits the same sequence behind the NASA win: an SBA-backed loan for initial capital, the Emerging Leaders Program for strategy, and the Mentor-Protege Program for the joint venture structure that produced a multi-million-dollar contract win in 2023. By the SBA's count, the company has grown from four employees to more than 350 across multiple locations, with revenue up 282 percent, and it has since expanded into a larger corporate headquarters. Sims, a native of Falkville, Alabama, and a University of Alabama in Huntsville graduate, represented the state in Washington, D.C., during National Small Business Week in May 2026.

Why the timing matters at Marshall

Arrow's Edge is stepping into its prime role at a moment when Marshall's workload is expanding rather than holding steady. The center manages design, development and integration for the Space Launch System and leads NASA's Human Landing System program, and it sits at the center of the Artemis campaign now that Artemis II has flown its crewed lunar flyby. Federal appropriations passed in 2025 set aside $100 million specifically for improvements to Marshall's facilities as part of a broader $1 billion allocation across NASA's crewed spaceflight centers, and NASA has separately solicited a hybrid contract vehicle worth up to $3.25 billion for engineering and science services spanning Marshall, Michoud Assembly Facility and Stennis Space Center.

None of that spending flows through the facilities operations and maintenance line directly, but it describes a center whose physical footprint is being asked to do more, not less, over the life of a five-year O&M contract. A facilities contractor holding the prime at Marshall right now is holding it during a stretch when the center's infrastructure, utilities and buildings are under sustained pressure from an active human spaceflight program rather than a legacy research mission running on maintenance mode.

The pattern behind the milestone

What makes the Seabrook Solutions trajectory unusual is not that a small business grew, it's that the growth mechanism is fully traceable through public federal contracting programs rather than through a single lucky bid. An SBA loan financed the startup phase. The Emerging Leaders Program financed the strategy. The Mentor-Protege Program financed the capability gap that let a four-person shop eventually co-prime a $317 million contract with a company that itself was carved out of a $2.4 billion AECOM divestiture. Each step is a matter of public record, and each step points at the next.

For a market that runs on set-aside categories, mentor-protege rules and 8(a) status, Seabrook Solutions is close to a template case: a Native American and woman-owned small business that used every rung of the federal small-business ladder in sequence, then converted twelve years of subcontracted trust into a hometown prime award at the exact moment its NASA customer's spending is pointed up.