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BY TRACY IDELL HAMILTON

Sam Ximenes is one of just a few people on this planet who’ve earned the title of Space Architect. Now he’s helping young people in San Antonio expand their own horizons in all things space related — from principles of rocketry to designing and bringing together an array of technologies to build habitats on the Moon and Mars in the not-to-distant future. 

Sam is a San Antonio native, born at Ft. Sam Houston and baptized at San Fernando Cathedral. But as part of an Air Force family, he called many places home while growing up, including Laredo, Texas; California, Spain, Germany and the Philippines, where he graduated from high school. He returned to Texas to study environmental design, a precursor to architecture, at Texas A&M. 

Sam’s artistic spirit led him toward a variety of creative jobs after college. “I considered myself an artist,” he said. 

Sam Ximenes, shown here in 2007 at the first office location of XArc, spent many years in creative jobs before pursuing a degree in space architecture. 

For several years he oversaw the team of artisans who created public art for the city of South Lake Tahoe. Searching for a mentor, he traveled to Mexico and found a job fashioning toys out of leather scraps from a shoe factory in Cuernavaca. In Germany, he designed urban street furniture. It was there that he launched a startup that pioneered video wayfinding kiosks — before the internet was a thing. 

A contract to provide the kiosks to a world’s fair appeared to be the boost the company needed to go big, but when the fair went broke, so did Sam’s company. “It was a failure, but I learned from it,” he said. 

His earlier interest in architecture resurfaced. At the time, the idea of a space station was just that — an idea. Sam researched how one might orient oneself in space, absent visual cues and gravity. The resulting paper he authored was published in a journal, and Sam was officially hooked on space –— specifically, the young but growing discipline of space architecture. 

Sam became one of the first three students enrolled in what would become the Sasakawa International Center for Space Architecture at the University of Houston. 

Sam and Astroport team members around the lunar module they're building that will scoop up regolith to be turned into bricks and tiles.

After earning his master’s degree there, Sam joined an architecture firm, working on design concepts for lunar bases. As a NASA contractor, he developed Space Station cabin architectures and led design integration of the Japanese and European lab modules for the NASA Space Station program. He was also a member of the design team for Spaceport America, the world’s first purpose-built commercial spaceport. 

Sam went on to hold executive management positions at Lockheed Martin, L-3 Communications, and Futron Corporation. After several years at these big firms, Sam wanted to return to his roots as a designer and architect. In 2007, he founded Exploration Architecture Corporation, or XArc, an interplanetary architecture firm that is working on technologies to enable Earth, Moon and Mars habitation. 

As he worked to grow his company, Sam realized that San Antonio wasn’t developing enough talent for this emerging field. His 2013 TEDx talk crystalized his vision of San Antonio harnessing the inspiration of space exploration to steer young people into STEM careers. 

Journey to the Center of the Moon: Sam Ximenes's 2013 TEDx talk in San Antonio.

Then he did just that, launching the WEX Foundation, which introduces students to space exploration technology via project-based learning, including how to use lunar rocks, 3D printers and robots to develop the first habitats for human settlements on the Moon. 

Since its launch, WEX and its programs have already connected with 10,000 young people, Sam says, via lunar habitation exhibits inside the AREA 21 technology showcase at the Boeing Center at Tech Port, its summer Stellar Xplorers program and the in-depth Lunar Caves Analog Test Sites program. 

Local high school students in the WEX Foundation's LCATS program descend into the Cave With No Name outside of Boerne, Texas.

Known as LCATS, the three-year program offers young people an expansive curriculum where, among its many hands-on experiences, Texas caves serve as analog environments for student experiments and technology challenges as humans contemplate establishing future settlements on the moon’s own cave systems. 

Even as WEX focuses on developing tomorrow’s space talent, Sam continues to expand his own horizons. In 2020, he launched Astroport Space Technologies, a subsidiary of XArc, to develop regolith solidification technologies – aka space bricks built on the lunar surface through large 3D printers that utilize moon dirt as source material, for landing pads, roads and other lunar surface construction. 

This rendering shows robots building a landing pad of regolith bricks on the moon. Courtesy Astroport.

Astroport has landed multiple small-business innovation and technology transfer awards from NASA as part of its $93 billion Artemis program to create a moon base and eventually send humans to Mars. The company also scored a spot landed a spot on a rover scheduled to fly to the moon in 2027/2028, to test some of its technology. 

Those wins mean Astroport is growing, and the company has a handful of offices across the globe. But locating its headquarters at Port San Antonio (along with the WEX Foundation office) was a no-brainer, Sam said. 

“The Port is the place to be for high tech growth,” he said. “We want to be part of that vision.”