With facilities dotting central New Mexico, X-Bow Systems Inc. is poised to become a significant player in the state's space industry.
That’s because the startup has a contraption to print rocket motors. And after about six years of operating underground, the company says it is now ready to talk about its concept — and a New Mexico expansion.
In an interview with Business First, X-Bow chief revenue officer and co-founder Maureen Gannon spelled out the concept of printing rocket motors, which aims to increase production speed and reduce cost. That’s significant considering motors can be among the most expensive rocket components. It also means operators may be able to enter the market more easily from a financial perspective.
The motor printer can fit inside a storage container. Within the container, a robotic arm disperses a substance which, once “printed,” solidifies. Rocket motors are different from engines, which use liquid propellants as opposed to solid propellants.
“We're moving out of... the industry standard,” Gannon said. “It's like you take a giant KitchenAid mixer and you blow it up to [100] times in size... and you pay, you know, an absolute fortune in the millions of dollars for this giant mixer. And then you put it in a giant factory," she added. "We reduce manufacturing footprint and we lower the overhead cost... so we're trying to drive competition in that market."
"There's other companies out there that 3D print rockets and rocket parts. That's not new, that's not novel. What's new and novel is being able to take an energetic and 3D print it. That's very exciting."
X-Bow used to be based in Huntsville, Alabama. But, in 2019, it moved to New Mexico and opened a 1,600-square-foot office in the Sandia Science & Technology Park. The expansion was driven by a Cooperative Research and Development Award from Sandia National Laboratories for the commercialization of a particular vehicle, according to Gannon.
"Through doing that, what we very rapidly found out was the most expensive part of the vehicle we were looking to commercialize was the actual motor," she said. "So that is when we started looking at, very very quickly, how can we build a better mousetrap and make that motor in-house because there were only two places we could turn to get that motor."
Afterward, the company found New Mexico to be a prime place for developing its company. Since it has moved here, X-Bow has opened no less than five different facilities that span research and development, lab, warehouse, manufacturing and office space between Albuquerque and Socorro. Now it is considering an at least 12,000-square-foot facility at Max Q, a mixed-use development slated for vacant land near Kirtland Air Force Base (Kevin Yearout, managing partner at project developer Thunderbird Kirtland Development LLC, would neither confirm nor deny project plans).
The startup is also moving into a 5,000-square-foot office in the Uptown area after outgrowing its space at the Sandia Science & Technology Park, which it is vacating.
“We are occupying a larger and larger footprint in New Mexico,” Gannon said. "Alicia Keyes was very helpful in the economic development side of things, we've worked with [New Mexico Sen. Martin] Heinrich's office as well and staff from [New Mexico Sen. Ben Ray] Lujan's office. So we just really found New Mexico a great place to be, and we are going to continue expanding."
Between December 2020 and December 2021, the company was awarded more than $867,000 in Job Training Incentive Program money, used to fund training for newly-created positions at relocating or expanding businesses, according to the New Mexico Economic Development Department. Gannon said it may hire 20 or more people "in the next few quarters in Albuquerque."
X-Bow's expansion comes as public and private institutions in the state try to spur space-related economic development projects with federal Build Back Better funds. According to reporting in 3DPrint, an industry publication, X-Bow “debuts as one of the leading firms in its niche” partly because of government contracts.
The Air Force, Army and the Department of the Interior have awarded contracts to X-Bow, according to government spending data. New Mexico Tech was also an early partner, said Gannon. She cofounded X-Bow along with CEO Jason Hundley, CTO Max Kozoff, CFO Yasmin Seyal and senior vice President Mark Kaufman.
For Gannon’s part, she was a founder at Firefly Space Systems, which eventually rebooted as a separate rocket company called Firefly Aerospace. Gannon is also an "original founder" of a philanthropic organization within the Virgin brand of companies called Galactic Unite, she said. (Likewise, she was also one of the first 80 people to purchase a Virgin Galactic flight ticket, according to reporting in The Mercury News.)
“I like the idea of promoting STEM education and technology in the younger generations. And I look to really inculcate that in X-Bow as well,” she told Business First.
X-Bow closed a $2.4 million seed round two years ago and is now trying to raise a $15 million to $20 million Series A. Crosslink Capital, a San Francisco VC, Albuquerque's ABQid Fund and the Ingenuity Venture Fund are among its investors.
"We like the team, we think the market is taking off... and we think the product is truly revolutionary," said ABQid executive director TJ Cook. Others such as Relativity space, which previously garnered press for the "world's first 3D-printed rocket," and Rocket Lab have entered the realm of additively manufactured space vehicles.
And if 3D printing could help reduce the cost of motor production, the barrier to entry for commercial launch operations could be lowered. As Gannon puts it, "it's challenging to make a competitive product if you don't have the ability to go out and source things from a competitive market."
Editor's note: Collin Krabbe covers tech and startups for Albuquerque Business First and oversees the New Mexico Inno publication. To reach out directly, send an email to ckrabbe@bizjournals.com.
