Besxar is building an orbital semiconductor factory, one SpaceX rocket at a time — SkimNews
Get the Tech newsletter
Daily tech — startups, AI labs, chips, the launches that shape the next decade. Free.
- Besxar is prototyping an orbital semiconductor factory across roughly a dozen SpaceX Falcon 9 flights, exploiting the vacuum of space instead of the pressurized clean rooms that the company says make Earth-based fabs "hugely insane infrastructure projects."
- Founder Ashley Pilipiszyn, a former OpenAI staffer, has raised nearly $14 million for the effort, including a $9 million seed round led by Dauntless Ventures and Overture VC.
- The startup's first two "fabships" flew on a July Starlink mission, and the exposed wafer samples came back with less particulate contamination than non-flown terrestrial wafers — despite a flight data system malfunction in one canister that the company is still investigating.
- Besxar plans to iterate over the next two years, scaling from heating wafers to depositing one material, then two, and so on, with the ultimate goal of flying larger fabs aboard SpaceX's still-in-development Starship.
- Pilipiszyn first approached SpaceX three years ago about buying Starship flights but settled on Falcon 9 booster payload deals as a way to de-risk the technology in the meantime.
- Rivals United Semiconductors and Space Forge face the same bottleneck — limited ability to return meaningful product volumes — and Besxar's path to hundreds or thousands of wafers per fab hinges on Starship or next-gen rockets from Rocket Lab or Stoke Space becoming operational.
Why it matters: By manufacturing in space, Besxar sidesteps the pressurized clean rooms that founder Pilipiszyn calls "hugely insane infrastructure projects" on Earth. Qualification samples could supply wafers for the power-regulating chips used in data centers, robots, and EVs — but scaling past hundreds of wafers per fab requires SpaceX's Starship or rival next-generation rockets to drive launch costs down.
Ask SkimNews
