The relationship

The relationship predates the Institute’s current name. Support for what was then the NASA Lunar Science Institute began in 2010; by 2012 that meant running its web presence outright. When Marqui Labs formed in 2015, the Institute asked for the team by name, and the support never broke stride. NLSI became SSERVI. Our seat grew.

Today SSERVI connects the research teams working on humanity’s return to the Moon — their platform has reached 100K+ unique users across 196 countries — and our studio works across the Institute itself: creative direction for its films and messaging, the web and cloud infrastructure, the workplace technologies it runs on day to day, event production, and live broadcast, with strategy running through all of it.

The rebuild

When aging tech put the site on the chopping block, the answer was a complete redesign, rebuild, and relaunch — shipped in under 45 days, live in March 2023. Believed to be one of NASA’s first headless-architected websites: a decoupled stack inside NASA-approved AWS GovCloud, 1,500+ articles migrated, page loads cut from six seconds to under one. Compliance handled quietly, the way it should be.

The rescue became the standing arrangement. The publication database and its streamlined submission workflows now carry the Institute’s scientific record — nearly 1,700 papers and counting.

The forum

The Exploration Science Forum is the Institute’s flagship annual gathering, produced from this seat since 2012 — the web presence, abstract collection and review, registration, and the live hybrid broadcast itself. In 2025 the forum gained a talk recommender — pick your topics, get a personal program. Deliberately modest engineering, deliberately not oversold.

The films

The engagement extends to the Institute’s story itself. A self-initiated field expedition film — shot run-and-gun in the caves and craters of Flagstaff — screened for NASA science leadership. A team-film series that began with CASA Moon and had other research teams asking for theirs before the credits ended. And in 2024, technical lead for the Institute’s live eclipse broadcast from Mazatlán: Starlink hauled to the venue, multi-camera coverage timed to eclipse phases, a broadcast that went on to win two Emmys — with the film cut from it in 72 hours.

How it runs

Research doesn’t pause for maintenance windows. The platform is built and operated for continuity — automated pipelines, monitored infrastructure, and a direct line to the team that wrote every line of it. The same continuity holds beyond the screen: the workplace technologies the Institute works on daily, the annual forum, the broadcasts, the films. The Institute’s director calls it a trusted creative and technology partner across its most visible, mission-critical work. Sixteen years in, the trust is the infrastructure.