On September 11, it was reported that startup Besxar, founded by former OpenAI employees, is attempting to move semiconductor manufacturing into space to leverage the natural vacuum of space as an alternative to the costly cleanroom infrastructure on Earth. Recently, Besxar has begun validating its orbital semiconductor manufacturing prototype via SpaceX’s Falcon 9.
Core logic: Go where the physical laws are already "ready".
Ashley Pilipiszyn, founder and CEO of Besxar, formerly an employee at OpenAI, said that ground-based fabs are “extremely large and complex infrastructure projects” because they require the construction of positively pressurized cleanrooms to block even the tiniest dust particles and contaminants—a single speck of dust landing on a wafer can ruin an entire chip.
“We are at a time when going to an environment where the laws of physics themselves work in our favor is actually more cost-effective than on Earth,” Pilipizyn said. “Don’t fight against the laws of physics on Earth.”
In Besxar’s view, the vacuum of space naturally offers a purity level that terrestrial cleanrooms cannot match, which is essential for protecting sensitive materials from contamination. Rather than spending billions of dollars on Earth to replicate a “near-vacuum” environment, it makes more sense to use space itself as a cleanroom.
Moreover, the deeper value of space manufacturing lies in the elimination of thermal convection and buoyancy effects in microgravity. On Earth, thermal convection during material melting disrupts atomic arrangement like a "blender," causing crystal defects. In a microgravity environment, atoms can arrange themselves more quietly, resulting in compound semiconductor crystals with more perfect structures—potentially achieving electrical conductivity 10 to 100 times higher than ground-based products.
Josh Western, CEO and founder of Space Forge, another startup targeting semiconductor manufacturing in space, has previously stated that the vacuum and microgravity conditions in space can enable more effective development of entirely new semiconductor materials. “Growing compound semiconductors is a very intense and slow process—they essentially grow from the atomic level.” “Gravity has a profound impact on this, essentially altering the bonds between these atoms. In space, you can overcome this obstacle because there is almost no gravity.”
Western added that space provides a superior manufacturing base for nearly any material. "By combining microgravity with a high-purity vacuum—eliminating the need for multi-stage pumps—access to space enables the creation of approximately one billion new alloy combinations and exposes materials to extreme temperatures ranging from -260°C to 260°C, allowing researchers to manufacture semiconductors that are 10 to 100 times more efficient than those on Earth."
First flight verification: Wafer samples are cleaner in space than on Earth.
In October 2025, Besxar has partnered with SpaceX to validate its orbital semiconductor manufacturing prototype across approximately 12 Falcon 9 flights, testing the concept of using space’s natural vacuum as a cost-effective alternative to expensive cleanroom infrastructure on Earth.
On July 5, 2026, Besxar’s inaugural mission, “Mission Asimov,” launched aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 booster, carrying two V1 Fabships (manufacturing modules) on a suborbital flight. These modules transported wafer samples of compound semiconductors—including GaAs and AlInAsSb—from the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Virginia. Notably, these microwave-sized “Clipper-class” containers are modular manufacturing units that leverage space conditions—such as vacuum, microgravity, and thermal environments—as process parameters. Mounted on the Falcon 9 booster, they did not enter orbit but returned to Earth with the booster after several minutes of suborbital flight.
The objective of this test was to verify that the container could withstand launch loads, protect the wafer samples from contamination, and expose them to the vacuum of space. According to Compound Semiconductor, post-flight inspections revealed that the container structure remained intact, with no cracks, warping, or visible damage to the wafer samples.
Pilipizyn further noted: "Samples that have experienced spaceflight are the cleanest, with the lowest particle contamination, compared to ground-based wafers that have never been to space... which is ideal for our subsequent scaling efforts." Independent material-level analysis of the compound semiconductor wafer samples is currently ongoing.
Technical Roadmap: Gradual Upgrades from Heating to Deposition
Besxar's roadmap is clear and incremental, with plans to gradually increase the complexity of experiments over the next two years:
Phase 1: Heat the wafer to verify in-orbit thermal management capability.
Stage 2: Deposit a material to enable fundamental thin-film growth.
Stage three: Expand to two or more materials, moving closer to true semiconductor manufacturing processes.
Besxar’s ultimate goal is to mount larger-scale manufacturing modules on SpaceX’s Starship, which is still under development. When Pilipizyn first approached SpaceX three years ago, the initial discussion was about using Starship’s launch services, but they ultimately chose to first carry payloads on Falcon 9 boosters to reduce technical risks at a controllable cost.
Once capable of producing qualified samples, Besxar plans to supply wafers to leading chip manufacturers for the production of advanced chips that regulate power in data centers, robotics, and electric vehicles. This market positioning avoids direct competition with TSMC and Samsung in logic processes, instead focusing on the power semiconductor sector, where material purity is critical.
Although the first flight validated basic feasibility, there is a vast gap between “engineering experiment” and “commercial manufacturing.” The suborbital flight of the Falcon 9 booster provides only minutes of vacuum exposure, whereas actual semiconductor thin-film deposition may require hours or longer in a controlled environment. It remains unknown when Starship will achieve routine, low-cost operations.
Multiple companies have already begun to establish a presence.
Besxar has raised nearly $14 million to date, including a $9 million seed round led by Dauntless Ventures and Overture VC, with participation from Keymaker VC, 645 Ventures, and others. The company has also received early support from NVIDIA’s Inception program and has initiated a U.S. Department of Defense contract focused on developing defense-grade materials and radiation-hardened components.
The space semiconductor manufacturing sector is not limited to Besxar alone. United Semiconductors and Space Forge are also exploring the use of the space environment to produce higher-quality semiconductors. However, all players face a common bottleneck: how to transport sufficient quantities of products back to Earth. Pilipizien anticipates that a single factory’s output will gradually scale from hundreds to thousands of wafers, but this path heavily depends on the maturation of low-cost rockets—whether SpaceX’s Starship, or next-generation rockets from competitors like Rocket Lab and Stoke Space.
A research project previously funded by the U.S. CHIPS Act and NASA’s In Space Production Applications is also investigating semiconductor manufacturing in space. The principal investigator of the project is NASA senior materials engineer Curtis Hill, who leads a team that has simplified the etching step in semiconductor manufacturing by leveraging the microgravity environment of space.
Notably, the CEO of Japanese semiconductor foundry Rapidus recently gave a speech in the U.S., stating plans to build a semiconductor factory on the lunar surface around 2040.
While companies like Besxar focus on "manufacturing wafers in space," Musk's Terafab plan, released in March 2026, targets deploying computing power in space.
Terafab, jointly developed by Tesla, SpaceX, and xAI, has been called by Tesla "the largest chip manufacturing facility ever built," with the goal of producing 1 terawatt of AI computing power annually—equivalent to 50 times the current global annual output of AI computing chips. The project will disrupt the existing global division of labor in chip manufacturing by consolidating the entire process—photomask fabrication, chip production, and packaging and testing—within a single facility, enabling a rapid iterative loop of "mask fabrication—chip manufacturing—testing—mask optimization—remanufacturing."
Elon Musk has clearly stated that Terafab’s strategic focus is on space, driven by the inherent limitations of Earth’s energy and computing resources. The high-power custom chips it produces will be specifically designed to operate in the extreme conditions of space and will be deployed across SpaceX’s orbital AI data center network.
Editor's Note:
Manufacturing chips in space is indeed a great idea, but many key issues still need to be addressed.
Currently, there are no devices available that can manufacture semiconductors in space. Simply launching existing semiconductor equipment into space would be prohibitively expensive and may not meet operational requirements. Additionally, installing such equipment presents a significant challenge. For example, the photolithography machines, which are critical to semiconductor manufacturing, are massive and weigh tens of tons; even on Earth, their installation and calibration can take months. Customizing space-compatible versions from manufacturers like ASML would be an option, but the cost would still be extremely high.
However, teams are currently advancing the validation of compact space manufacturing equipment. For example, Nitride Global, in collaboration with United Semiconductors and Axiom Space, was selected for NASA’s SBIR program to develop a physical vapor deposition reactor for growing aluminum nitride (AlN) crystals in microgravity. Their proof-of-concept reactor consumes only 250–400 watts of power, weighs less than 700 grams, operates at temperatures of 2800–3200°C, and meets the integration constraints of International Space Station storage lockers.
In addition, the compound semiconductor materials that Besxar focuses on for growth are inherently more suitable for miniaturization than the photolithography processes used for logic chips. Of course, achieving a fully functional "space wafer factory" still presents significant engineering challenges in adapting equipment for deposition, etching, metrology, and other processes.
Second, even when space-based semiconductor production lines are ready, they will still face the same dilemma: Can the raw materials required for semiconductor manufacturing be supplied consistently and reliably? Relying solely on launches from Earth would pose challenges in terms of cost and logistics time, as semiconductor production lines require uninterrupted 24/7 operation.
Additionally, once the product is manufactured, it must wait in line for return cabin space. The Dragon cargo spacecraft can only bring back approximately 3,000 kilograms of downmass per mission, and the schedule is determined by the International Space Station’s crew rotation cycles, meaning manufacturers cannot “call a ride” according to their own production timelines. Industry analysis shows that the bottleneck in return logistics has “reshaped the economics of the entire emerging industry,” with the return services market size estimated at $1.5 to $1.8 billion in 2026 and projected to grow to $3.5 billion by 2030.
Third, space radiation is another issue that must be addressed. High-energy particles in space can alter the crystal lattice structure of chips, creating "vacancy defects" or "interstitial defects," leading to performance degradation or failure.
However, research indicates that for a 200-mm wafer, the effective radiation damage under no electric field is less than 10 rad, and can be repaired through simple annealing. Stronger counter-evidence comes from Google’s Project Suncatcher experiment: its Trillium AI chip survived testing equivalent to five years of low-Earth-orbit radiation exposure. This suggests that radiation poses a far lesser threat to “wafers in manufacturing” than to “finished chips during long-term operation.” The core challenges of space-based manufacturing remain focused on thermal management and logistics, not radiation.
Fourth, the ultimate form of semiconductor manufacturing in space may not involve transporting them back to Earth, but rather using them in place—where "space factories" directly serve "space infrastructure," creating a closed loop independent of Earth.
Although Musk’s Terafab initiative is primarily ground-based, its product positioning clearly targets SpaceX’s orbital AI data center network. If, in the future, orbital data centers, satellite constellations, and space manufacturing platforms reach scale, chips, motherboards, and cooling systems manufactured in orbit could be assembled and deployed on-site, completely bypassing the bottleneck of downlink transportation. Of course, this would require complementary capabilities for space-based chip manufacturing, motherboard production, and packaging and testing to also be established in orbit—an undertaking no less challenging than chip manufacturing itself. But at least logically, this approach is more coherent than building components on Earth and then transporting them back for packaging and testing.
Besxar is currently positioned to supply wafers to terrestrial chip manufacturers, which still follows the "manufactured in space, used on Earth" pathway. However, a true closed loop requires the entire supply chain to be space-based.
In summary, the logic behind semiconductor manufacturing in space is sound, but its bottleneck lies not in “whether it can be done,” but in the need for supporting space manufacturing equipment, stable material supply, and cost competitiveness. Therefore, in the short term, the most viable path remains the growth of high-value, compact compound semiconductor materials, rather than full-scale logic chip manufacturing.
This article is from the WeChat official account: Chip Intelligence, edited by: Chip Intelligence - Langke Jian, authored by: Chip Intelligence - Langke Jian, original title: “Manufacturing Semiconductors in Space: This Company Has Already Started Testing!”