North Wind Brings Nominal Into ASCENT to Help Frontier Engineering Teams Move Faster

North Wind (opens in new tab) operates some of the most advanced physical test infrastructure in the country: eleven facilities spanning propulsion, hypersonics, and flight systems testing, including its flagship tunnel in Plymouth, Minnesota. For decades, that scale of infrastructure has depended on engineers carrying hard-won knowledge from one test to the next, largely by memory and spreadsheet.

Bringing Nominal into ASCENT changes that. Telemetry, sensor data, logs, and video from testing across North Wind's facilities now flow into a shared environment as they're captured, so engineering teams can monitor systems in real time, catch issues earlier, and move from physical evidence to the next engineering decision without waiting on manual data wrangling. The goal is a connected data layer where every test feeds the next design instead of starting over at the next facility.

"North Wind customers come to us to solve difficult engineering and test challenges where the quality and speed of learning matter," said Artie Mabbett, CEO of North Wind. "By bringing Nominal into the North Wind Technology Alliance, we're giving customer engineering teams a stronger connection between what happens in the physical environment and the digital insight needed to act on it."

“North Wind’s ASCENT environment connects physical and digital learning in a repeatable cycle, so insights compound across development rather than resetting with each test,” said Cameron McCord, co-founder and CEO of Nominal. “Nominal provides the data infrastructure that turns every test, simulation, and hardware iteration into reusable engineering knowledge—helping teams understand system performance faster, carry learning forward, and accelerate development without sacrificing rigor.”