Upon the official announcement, on March 13, 2014, that Syfy had picked up the miniseries, Bill McGoldrick, Executive Vice President of Original Content for Syfy stated: "Phil Levens has crafted a bold and surprising spin on the space opera. We are equally excited to embark on this journey with our partners at UCP, Sea to Sky, Lionsgate, Jason Blum and his Blumhouse Productions and also with Mark Stern who shepherded this project while at Syfy".
On July 14, 2014, at the Television Critics Association summer press tour, Jason Blum, Tricia Helfer, Philip Levens, and Brian Van Holt commented on the upcoming show.
Executive producer Jason Blum said that:
What piqued [his] interest was the originality of EP Philip Levens' story idea, which was inspired by Freeman Dyson's Project Orion to design a nuclear-propelled spacecraft. Levens pointed out that President Kennedy squashed the development of Orion soon after the Bay of Pigs as the military began equipping the spaceship with weapons. He was terrified that they were turning it into a Death Star.
About the starship he said that "it feels like a cruise ship. Essentially the ship is like a time capsule, another civilization that continued for 50 years parallel to our civilization." Blum added that:
The people on the ship, only some of their children, but most of their grandchildren, are the only people who are going to arrive at this new world. A lot of the people who started on this ship have died. It's their children, their children's children, who are going to get to where they're going. And there are a lot of conflicts going on. Should they turn around and go back to Earth, which they've lost touch with? So they have no idea of what Earth even looks like now. Should they continue? Also there's been a murder on the ship, which never happened before. So that's kind of what starts it.
Tricia Helfer said about Viondra that her "manipulative" character considers herself the "mother of the people on the ship, the mother of humanity in one way if Earth did blow itself up". "Brian [Van Holt] and I play a married couple and as the wife, I'm definitely the woman behind the man more than we would see in our society here on Earth today", Helfer added. She explained about the ship's crew that:
Their morals and the values that they're dealing with are still from the '60s. The society on the ship is very hierarchical and uses genetic linking-arranged marriages, basically to sustain human life (three generations will be born during the trip to Proxima). [My] character Viondra started out on the lower decks but rose through the ranks, as did her husband. They're a power couple. Viondra will do anything to stay in power.
Creator Philip Levens said that:
Ascension will explore how technology has evolved on the ship and the way morality is still rooted in an early '60s, pre-Civil Rights Act view [of] humanity. Issues of class – the ship is divided into decks, with people in positions of power living on the upper ones – will also come into play. There's much more of a sense of obeying your parents because, you know, for the ship to really work, everybody has to cooperate. The murder is kind of the starting of the unravelling, so to speak. And kids start to question choices made by their grandparents. There's a thing on board the ship called "the crisis". It's this existential dilemma that everyone has to go through when they realize that, you know, their life has been circumscribed for them. You know, everybody they ever know or ever will know is already around them. So there's lots of issues like that kind of play [as] a coming of age thing with the kids and their parents.
Because the series is set on a ship that is self-contained and self-sustained, the people have evolved and developed differently than they would have if they'd remained on Earth. Not only is the technology different, but they think differently, too
Brian Van Holt described his character as "a man caught in the middle, aware that his legacy as the ship's 'middle route' captain won't probably go down in the record books. The one who launches the ship and the one who lands it will be remembered. No one in the now will be remembered. So he struggles with that". He concluded by saying that "he's a very ambitious character who sought out a leadership role, which was presented to him after an act of heroism on the ship".
