If you manufacture in space and want to bring that product back, your options are limited. Either wait to go to the International Space Station or partner with a handful of startups that launch spacecraft that spend time in orbit before returning to Earth.
But it’s SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket booster that goes into space and returns to Earth more often than any other vehicle, making 163 round trips last year and more than 100 times this year already. Now, a startup has announced that it has negotiated a deal with Elon Musk’s space company to allow it to prototype an orbiting semiconductor factory in more than a dozen booster flights.
Besxar, a startup founded by former OpenAI staffer Ashley Pilipyshyn, wants to harness the vacuum of space to manufacture critical precursors for advanced semiconductors. The main reason chip factories on Earth are such insane infrastructure projects is because they require the creation of pressurized clean rooms to eliminate even the most minute dust and contaminants that could ruin the chips during production. Pilipysin claims that a new generation of rockets could provide an alternative to all of this infrastructure, which is why he has raised nearly $14 million, including a $9 million seed round led by Dauntless Ventures and Overture VC.
“We’re in a time where it’s actually more cost-effective to go where the physics already works,” she told TechCrunch. “Stop it on Earth, where you’re fighting physics.”
The company’s first two “fabships” (small canisters designed to transport and test semiconductor materials in orbit) flew on the Starlink mission in July, intended to prove that the canisters could withstand launch, protect wafer samples from contamination, and expose them to the vacuum of space. Besxar achieved these objectives despite a malfunction in one canister’s flight data system, which is currently under investigation.
“The samples we flew were the cleanest and had the least amount of particulate matter compared to the wafers on the ground that we didn’t fly, which is great for us as we scale,” Piripisin told TechCrunch.
Besxar expects to continue iterating over the next two years with the ultimate goal of flying larger fabs on vehicles like SpaceX’s Starship, the company’s next-generation rocket currently in development. Pilipysin first approached SpaceX three years ago to discuss purchasing Starship Airlines tickets, ultimately agreeing to a booster payload deal in the interim as a way to de-risk its technology. The wafer is then heated and one material is deposited on the wafer, followed by two materials.
Once Besxar (named after Beskar, the metal used to make the Mandalorian’s armor in Star Wars) produces certified samples, it hopes to supply major chip makers with wafers used to make the kinds of advanced chips that control power in data centers, robots, and electric cars.
A number of companies, including United Semiconductors and Space Forge, are trying to harness the space environment to produce high-quality semiconductors, but they all face the same challenges. It is limited in its ability to return product in meaningful quantities. Pilipysin expects to start scaling up to hundreds or even thousands of wafers per fab, but that journey relies on cheap rockets. For that to happen, either SpaceX will have to make Starship operational, or competitors like Rocket Lab and Stoke Space will have to launch their own next-generation rockets to the ground.
“Now that we have a solid transport layer, we think we can focus on the application layer,” she told TechCrunch. “We can focus on core manufacturing and get products back on site and on the market as quickly as possible.”
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