NASA has awarded a competitive SBIR research contract to Targeted Convergence Corporation (TCC) to explore new ways mission teams can solve some of the most complex design and modeling challenges in aerospace engineering. The selection highlights the growing industry recognition of TCC’s Success Assured software, which has been gaining attention for its ability to accelerate early-stage mission and product design efforts.

NASA identified a series of critical “cross-cutting modeling challenges" for upcoming missions. NASA describes those challenges as including "greater modeling breadth (e.g., cost/schedule), depth (scalability), variable fidelity (precision/accuracy vs. computation time), trade space exploration (how to evaluate large numbers of options), and processes that link them together.” NASA further elaborates that “The disparity between the creativity in the early phases and the detail-oriented focus in later phases has created phase transition boundaries, where missions not only change teams, but tools and methods as well.” TCC’s work under this contract will demonstrate how the company’s technology can bring new efficiency and clarity to these early mission phases where decisions have long-lasting impact. And it will show how the set-based concurrent engineering enabled by Success Assured software can bridge those phase transition boundaries that tend to plague complex development efforts.

The Phase I research is scheduled for completion by March 27, 2026. If successful, NASA may pursue a Phase II effort to expand the work and apply it more widely across mission development programs.

“Our technology is designed specifically for the kind of complex engineering work NASA highlighted in this contract,” said Brian Kennedy, TCC’s Chief Technical Officer and the Principal Investigator for the project. “Traditional tools tend to encourage teams to jump to decisions prematurely; and then when later phases show those decisions to be wrong, the resulting rework results in tremendous inefficiency and project delays. Success Assured gives engineers the ability to explore more options earlier, collaborate more effectively, and reach validated decisions far faster than legacy tools allow. We are excited to show NASA exactly what this approach can do.”

Kennedy added, “These same challenges appear across industries including aerospace, automotive, energy, medical devices, and advanced manufacturing; so, the outcome of this project may influence engineering practices well beyond NASA."

About Success Assured® software:

Success Assured enables engineering teams to explore broader design spaces, reduce guesswork in early decision making, and cut development time by identifying feasible solutions earlier in the process. Teams using Success Assured have reported productivity improvements of up to four times and significant reductions in time to market.

About Targeted Convergence Corporation:

TCC is a global leader in set based concurrent engineering tools and processes. The company provides training, guidance, and advanced software to help engineering organizations move from ideation to validated design decisions with greater speed and confidence. For more information visit www.TargetedConvergence.com.

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"Success Assured gives engineers the ability to explore more options earlier, collaborate more effectively, and reach validated decisions far faster than legacy tools allow."