Besxar is building an orbital semiconductor factory, one SpaceX rocket at a time

Besxar is experimenting with making semiconductor precursor materials in orbit by sending small, self-contained canisters — called fabships — aboard frequently reused rockets. The startup’s approach takes advantage of the space vacuum to avoid the costly, highly pressurized clean rooms that Earth-based fabs require. The company’s founder, Ashley Pilipiszyn, who previously worked at OpenAI, says this could be a physics-driven alternative to fighting contamination on the ground.

The company flew two prototype fabships on a Starlink mission in July to validate basic survivability and contamination protection. Besxar reports the flown samples showed lower particulate counts than comparable terrestrial wafers, and the canisters survived launch despite a malfunction in the flight data system of one module that the team is investigating. Besxar plans iterative testing over the next two years, with incremental steps such as heating wafers and adding successive material depositions.

To get significant manufacturing capacity, Besxar intends to scale from its small canisters to larger orbital fabs, ultimately aiming to operate on vehicles like SpaceX’s Starship once that system is operational. Pilipiszyn first approached SpaceX about Starship flights three years ago and in the interim struck a deal to fly payloads on Falcon 9 boosters — rockets that flew back to Earth more than other vehicles, logging 163 booster round-trips last year and over 100 so far this year — as a way to de-risk the technology.

The company’s longer-term commercial target is to supply qualification wafers used in power-regulation chips for data centers, robots and electric vehicles. Besxar faces an industry-wide constraint: returning meaningful volumes of product from orbit. The startup says it expects to scale to hundreds and then thousands of wafers per fab if launch costs fall, a development that depends on next-generation, low-cost rockets from SpaceX or competitors such as Rocket Lab and Stoke Space. Other firms, including United Semiconductors and Space Forge, are pursuing related ideas but confront the same transport-and-return challenge.

Besxar is named after 'beskar,' the fictional metal from Star Wars, and has raised seed capital to fund its early prototypes and testing. The company frames current reusable-rocket availability as a maturing transport layer that now allows it to concentrate on the manufacturing and recovery steps needed to bring products back to market.