A startup called Besxar has convinced SpaceX to let it use the Falcon 9 rocket booster as a flying semiconductor factory, taking advantage of space's natural vacuum to produce advanced chips without Earth-based clean rooms. The company, founded by former OpenAI staffer Ashley Pilipiszyn, has raised nearly $14 million to prototype orbital chip manufacturing across a dozen planned flights on the booster, which completes round trips to orbit more frequently than any other spacecraft.

Why Would Anyone Build a Chip Factory in Space?

On Earth, semiconductor fabrication requires massive, expensive infrastructure. Chip fabs need pressurized clean rooms that filter out even microscopic dust and contaminants, which can ruin wafers during production. Besxar's core insight is elegantly simple: space already provides what Earth-based fabs spend billions trying to create. "We're at a time where it's actually more cost-effective to go where the physics already works," Pilipiszyn explained. "Don't do it on Earth where you're fighting physics".

The Falcon 9 booster is an ideal test platform for this concept. Last year alone, SpaceX's Falcon 9 booster made 163 round trips to orbit and back, and has already completed more than 100 flights this year, making it the most frequently reused spacecraft in operation. For a startup trying to iterate on orbital manufacturing technology, that cadence offers an unmatched opportunity to run experiments and refine processes.

What Has Besxar Already Accomplished?

Besxar's first two "fabships," small canisters designed to carry and test semiconductor materials in orbit, flew on a July Starlink mission. The company successfully demonstrated that its canisters could survive launch, protect wafer samples from contamination, and expose them to the vacuum of space. Despite a malfunction in one canister's flight data system, which the company is investigating, the results were promising.

Pilipiszyn reported that the flown samples showed exceptional cleanliness compared to terrestrial wafers. "The flown samples were the cleanest and had the least amount of particulate matter compared to nonflown terrestrial wafers, which is fantastic for us as we scale up," she stated. This early validation suggests the fundamental concept is sound, even as the company works through technical challenges.

Pilipiszyn

How Is Besxar Planning to Scale This Technology?

• Near-term iterations: Over the next two years, Besxar will progressively add complexity to its orbital manufacturing process, starting with heating wafers, then depositing one material onto wafers, then multiple materials in sequence.
• Qualification samples: Once the company produces samples that meet industry standards, it plans to supply leading chipmakers with wafers used in advanced chips that regulate electrical power in data centers, robots, and electric vehicles.
• Volume scaling: Pilipiszyn expects to eventually scale from dozens of wafers per fab to hundreds and then thousands, but this depends entirely on cheap, reliable rocket access.

The company's ultimate goal is to fly larger manufacturing facilities aboard SpaceX's Starship, the company's next-generation rocket still in development. Pilipiszyn first approached SpaceX three years ago about buying flights on Starship, but eventually settled on the Falcon 9 booster payload deal as a way to de-risk her technology in the meantime.

Besxar is not alone in pursuing space-based semiconductor manufacturing. Other companies, including United Semiconductors and Space Forge, are also exploring how the space environment can produce higher-quality chips. However, all face the same fundamental constraint: the limited ability to return meaningful volumes of product to Earth.

What Does This Depend On?

Besxar's entire business model hinges on one critical factor: cheap, reliable access to space. "We believe that there is a solid transport layer now, so we can focus on the application layer," Pilipiszyn noted. "We can just focus on our core manufacturing and getting our products back down to earth to market as quickly as possible". That transport layer depends on SpaceX getting Starship operational, or competitors like Rocket Lab and Stoke Space launching their own next-generation rockets.

The company has already raised $14 million to fund its development, including a $9 million seed round led by Dauntless Ventures and Overture VC. This funding reflects investor confidence that the economics of space-based manufacturing could work, provided launch costs continue to decline. If SpaceX or its competitors achieve the reusable rocket cadence they're targeting, Besxar's model could transform how advanced semiconductors are produced, eliminating the need for Earth-bound mega-fabs in favor of orbital factories that leverage the vacuum of space.