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Yes, of course, you can start a node from another node using your favorite process management API. In ROS, you also have rosspawn which will provide this kind of service.

However, it seems to me that what you want to achieve does not really fit well with the ROS framework. When using component oriented frameworks, the general idea is to start all the services at the beginning (using a roslaunch file for instance) and stating nodes relations and configurations using the ROS parameters. Then no nodes should be killed before the whole system is shutdown.

Then monitoring tools and/or interactive tools should just be launched from outside, using rosrun.