Spaceline is an affordable web-based suite of data analysis and visualization tools designed for real-time collaboration among mission teams during all phases, from design to live operations and post-mission review. Priced at $40,000 per year, Spaceline offers a cost-effective solution that enhances operational accuracy, efficiency, and productivity by automating and streamlining many manual processes still in use today.
Authorized users can access Spaceline on their laptops or mobile devices to share, analyze, and review high-resolution simulations that update with changing mission conditions. This capability allows mission teams to visualize flight paths during planning, optimizing trajectories and data collection schedules.
Spaceline also allows operators to identify landmark objects observed by spacecraft cameras during both simulated planning and actual mission phases. The software captures gigabytes of detailed data on secure servers, providing critical real-time results.
"Spaceline enables operators to clearly see how their mission will perform in the future so they can make the necessary flight adjustments before launch and during flight," explained Sanford Selznick, Chief Software Architect at Ascending Node Technologies.
"The platform provides an automated flight-proven blueprint that does your mission math, eliminates cumbersome manual processes, and allows your full team to collaborate effortlessly in real time during key planning phases and actual flight operations. That's a game changer for missions of any size. Collaboration, security, and affordability are the breakthrough differentiators that enable Spaceline users to make rapid informed decisions based on key insights from a flight-qualified platform with unprecedented capabilities."
NASA has identified Spaceline as a critical asset for its Aspera galaxy exploration mission, and Ascending Node Technologies is in discussions with operators planning a range of missions from Earth observation to orbital debris.
"Our University of Arizona space team is thrilled to be working with Ascending Node Technologies and leading NASA's Aspera astrophysics mission that seeks to solve the mysteries surrounding how galaxies evolve and obtain fuel for the formation of stars. Spaceline is a mission-critical tool that's enabling us to simulate, collaborate, and walk through multiple precision iterations of the operation years before we launch," said Carlos Vargas, University of Arizona astronomer and Aspera Mission Principal Investigator.
Spaceline was developed from NASA's OSIRIS-REx asteroid sample collection mission, which traveled to the near-Earth asteroid Bennu to retrieve samples as part of a seven-year exploration.
By the time asteroid samples were delivered to Earth in 2023, a trio of OSIRIS-REx engineers and scientists had founded Ascending Node Technologies and transformed the space industry's slow, siloed, costly, and manual data processing practices. Multiple NASA Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) contracts have funded the development of Spaceline over five years.
These SBIR contracts have also supported later enhancements to the Spaceline platform, expanding its collaborative functionality to allow hundreds of users to analyze, iterate, and discuss mission simulations and flight data simultaneously in real time.
The Ascending Node Technologies team, including Chief Software Architect Sanford Selznick, Chief Scientist Carl Hergenrother, and Chief Aerospace Engineer John Kidd, was formed in 2018 during the OSIRIS-REx mission. The University of Arizona, instrumental in the OSIRIS-REx mission, has fostered several new space companies, including Ascending Node Technologies. The company's three principals have extensive experience in space industry missions, with over half a century of combined expertise in developing, planning, and operating interplanetary exploration missions. Paul Sims
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