5 years and $50 million: 3 questions with NewSpace Nexus’ Casey Anglada DeRaad

The space industry is growing rapidly and NewSpace Nexus wants New Mexico to be the next major hub for companies looking to innovate.

The Albuquerque-based organization, which has a co-innovation hub for space-oriented startups and runs programs such as the NewSpace Ignitor and Pathway to the Stars, is celebrating five years this month.

The Journal sat down with NewSpace Founder and CEO Casey Anglada DeRaad to discuss what the company does, what it has learned since its founding and where it expects the space industry to be in the next decade.

These answers have been edited and condensed for clarity.

NewSpace Nexus was founded in 2019 and your organization is celebrating five years. What is it that NewSpace does?

“NewSpace Nexus is accelerating the pace of space innovation by uniting and igniting space. We launched NewSpace Nexus on Dec. 19, 2019, with the collaboration, experience and brainpower of over 200 space industry stakeholders across government, academia and the private sector and across New Mexico in what we now call Space Valley. A fun fact to share is that we launched NewSpace the day before the new military service branch, the U.S. Space Force, was started. As a key organization that we collaborate with, it’s fun and exciting to be celebrating our five-year anniversaries this week alongside one another.

Today, we are proud to celebrate five years of success and $50 million in economic impact for the space companies we serve. We help them move from concept to product to sales faster with our ‘unite and ignite’ approach to grow the end-to-end space innovation pipeline — faster and better.

Our community is now more than 6,000 strong as we serve as an independent nonprofit that continually listens to and collaborates with an ever-increasing number of cross-sector stakeholders here in New Mexico and across the country to increase economic prosperity, and ensure the United States’ continued leadership in space. … NewSpace Nexus was built on the philosophy that the space industry will move forward faster and better when we all work together. It has been an honor to do just that, while providing space companies with faster access to the right connections, resources, customers and collaborations needed to get their products into space in less time.”

What has NewSpace learned about itself and also the space economy in New Mexico over those past five years?

“NewSpace Nexus has built a successful formula to accelerate innovation, collaboration and economic impact for the state of New Mexico with far-reaching impact across the nation. We work tirelessly to understand industry needs and address the problems space companies face that prevent their success, so more innovations make it into space.

Our incubator-like NewSpace Ignitor program serves more than 25 companies per year and starts with an assessment to figure out what resources each company needs. We then work with them to turn their concepts into revenue-generating products. This includes showcasing their innovations to money sources, like investors and government contracts. By taking a holistic, end-to-end approach to progress innovation, we enable more companies to succeed.

Approximately one-third of the companies in our NewSpace Ignitor program have expressed an interest in expanding or locating offices in New Mexico. They learn that New Mexico is a great place to thrive as we introduce them to our amazing partners and share our innovation ecosystem, national laboratories, purpose-built spaceport, investor partners like the New Mexico Angels and Space Fund, and the three Space Force organizations that work in the state — the Space Rapid Capabilities Office, the Air Force Research Laboratory and Space Systems Command. We track and work with over 140 space companies in New Mexico, up from 60 five years ago.”

Where does NewSpace Nexus and the space economy stand now in the state compared to the rest of the country, and where will it be in the next decade based on the movement happening here?

“New Mexico was a leader in the first space race. Five years ago, NewSpace Nexus began sharing the growing space industry opportunity, uniting the many stakeholders together, and highlighting that New Mexico is positioned to lead in this new space race. We convened the many partners to amplify the amazing space assets in our region, launched our igniting programs to support space industry and developed our national Space Industrial Base conferences to collaboratively progress innovation at a company level as well as the national space industry level from New Mexico for the nation.

The nation is making policy decisions based on recommendations from the NewSpace Nexus annual State of the Space Industrial Base Conference that brings hundreds of space companies and government leaders from across the nation to New Mexico. It provides recommendations that inform the White House, executive members of Congress, the National Space Council and the broader ecosystem.

Other states are seeing our impact and are proactively reaching out to us to expand our NewSpace co-innovation ecosystem to their regions for collective benefit and impact. Our competition is not other states; our competition is China. The more we work together, the more we can capitalize on our hyper-growth industry, which is forecasted to grow to $3 trillion in the next 20 years. Our work is exciting today, every day and will be even more exciting for New Mexico in the years to come.”