The Startup Trying to Build a Semiconductor Factory in Space

What if one of the world's most difficult manufacturing environments could be replaced by the emptiness of space?

That is the idea behind Besxar, a Washington, D.C.-based startup attempting to manufacture advanced semiconductor materials beyond Earth. Instead of building an enormous factory filled with ultra-clean rooms, vacuum systems and complex contamination controls, the company wants to take advantage of something space already provides for free: an extremely clean vacuum.

Semiconductor manufacturing is an extraordinarily demanding process. Modern chip materials have to be produced under tightly controlled conditions because microscopic contaminants can interfere with the properties and performance of the finished material. Manufacturers therefore spend enormous amounts of money maintaining specialized environments where temperature, pressure, particles and other variables can be carefully controlled.

Besxar's argument is simple: rather than spending heavily to recreate certain conditions on Earth, why not manufacture some semiconductor materials where those conditions naturally exist?

The company is developing what it calls “Fabships” — compact, reusable manufacturing units designed to travel into space, process semiconductor materials, return to Earth and eventually be refurbished for another mission. The long-term concept is not to manufacture complete computer chips in orbit, but to produce important semiconductor substrates, epitaxial layers and thin films that chipmakers can use in their own manufacturing processes.

And Besxar has already taken its first step.

On July 5, 2026, two of the company's Fabships flew aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 first-stage booster. The booster reached roughly 71 miles in altitude before returning to Earth, with the experiment lasting around 11 minutes. The Fabships carried semiconductor samples including gallium nitride on sapphire, silicon, gallium arsenide and other advanced materials.

The mission was not an orbital factory. It was a technology demonstration designed to answer a much more basic question: could Besxar's equipment survive a rocket launch, expose semiconductor materials to the vacuum of space and return them without contamination or physical damage?

According to Besxar, the answer was encouraging.

The company reported that its canisters survived the mission and maintained the required environmental conditions. Initial inspection found no cracking, warping or visible damage to the wafer samples. Besxar also said its flown substrates showed very low particulate contamination, although some of the material-level results are still undergoing independent analysis. One of the two canisters experienced an anomaly in its flight-data recording system, which the company says it is investigating.

The interesting part is what comes next.

Besxar's first mission was essentially a test of the container. Future missions are intended to gradually introduce actual manufacturing steps. The company plans to begin by heating wafers and eventually testing the deposition of semiconductor materials onto them, increasing the complexity with each flight.

It has a long way to go.

Besxar has contracted for 12 SpaceX missions as part of its development program, allowing the company to repeatedly test and improve its technology rather than attempting to build a full-scale orbital manufacturing system in a single leap. The company ultimately wants to develop larger Fabships capable of spending more time in space and performing more sophisticated manufacturing processes.

The potential applications are significant. Besxar is targeting advanced semiconductor materials that could eventually be used in technologies ranging from AI data centers and electric vehicles to quantum systems and other high-performance applications. The company believes manufacturing certain materials in space could produce purer or more consistent substrates while reducing some of the infrastructure required to create controlled manufacturing environments on Earth.

But the idea comes with enormous engineering and economic questions.

Getting equipment into space is still expensive. Manufacturing equipment has to survive launch vibrations, radiation, extreme temperature changes and reentry if it is designed to return to Earth. The manufacturing process itself must also work reliably without constant human intervention. And even if Besxar can produce superior semiconductor materials in space, it still has to prove that doing so can make economic sense at commercial scale.

That is why the company's current approach is so important. Rather than betting everything on a giant orbital factory, Besxar is building toward the concept through repeated experiments.

Its eventual ambition is much larger than the small canisters that have already flown.

The company wants to create a repeatable manufacturing cycle: launch a Fabship, manufacture semiconductor materials in space, return the finished substrates to Earth, refurbish the hardware and fly it again. Besxar eventually envisions larger systems operating for longer periods, potentially using rockets such as SpaceX's Starship to expand the scale of the operation.

It sounds like science fiction because, for now, it is still largely an experiment.

But the first experiment has already flown.

The idea behind Besxar represents a fascinating shift in the way engineers think about manufacturing. Instead of asking how to recreate the perfect environment on Earth, they are asking whether the most useful factory might be the environment that already exists beyond it.

If the company can turn that idea into a reliable manufacturing process, some of the materials powering the next generation of computers could eventually begin their journey not inside a factory on Earth, but inside a small spacecraft hundreds of kilometres above it.