Besxar Strikes Deal to Prototype an Orbital Chip Factory Across a Dozen Falcon 9 Flights

Besxar, a startup founded by former OpenAI staffer Ashley Pilipiszyn, says it has convinced SpaceX to let it prototype an orbital semiconductor factory across a dozen flights aboard a Falcon 9 booster. The company aims to manufacture key precursors for advanced semiconductors in the vacuum of space and return the products to Earth, a market with few existing options beyond the International Space Station or a small set of return-capsule startups.

Pilipiszyn argues that chip fabrication on Earth is so costly because it requires pressurized clean rooms to keep out microscopic dust and contaminants that can ruin a chip during production. She contends that a new generation of rockets could offer an alternative to that infrastructure. The Falcon 9 booster, which made 163 round-trips to space and back last year and has already flown more than 100 times this year, is the vehicle that reaches orbit and returns more often than any other.

Besxar has raised almost 14 million dollars, including a 9 million dollar seed round led by Dauntless Ventures and Overture VC. The company flew its first two fabships, small canisters designed to carry and test semiconductor materials in orbit, on a July Starlink mission. The flight was intended to prove the canisters could survive launch, protect wafer samples from contamination, and expose them to the vacuum of space. Besxar succeeded despite a malfunction in the flight data system in one canister, which it is investigating.

The flown wafer samples were the cleanest and had the least particulate matter compared with non-flown terrestrial wafers, Pilipiszyn said, which she called encouraging as the company scales up. Besxar, named after the fictional metal used to make Mandalorian armor in Star Wars, wants to eventually supply leading chipmakers with wafers used to make advanced chips that regulate electrical power in data centers, robots, and electric vehicles. Pilipiszyn first approached SpaceX three years ago about buying flights on Starship and settled on the booster payload deal as a way to de-risk her technology in the meantime.

Pilipiszyn frames the effort as taking advantage of physics rather than fighting it. We are at a time where it is actually more cost-effective to go where the physics already works, she said. She added that the company now believes a solid transport layer exists, allowing it to focus on its core manufacturing and on returning products to market as quickly as possible.

Besxar expects to keep iterating over the next two years, with the goal of flying larger fabs aboard a vehicle like SpaceX's Starship, still in development. The next steps are heating the wafers, then depositing one material on the wafers, then two materials, and so on. Pilipiszyn expects to scale to hundreds and then thousands of wafers per fab, a path that depends on cheap rockets and on SpaceX getting Starship operational, or competitors such as Rocket Lab and Stoke Space getting their own next-generation rockets flying. Other companies pursuing space-based semiconductor production include United Semiconductors and Space Forge, all of which face the same difficulty of returning a meaningful volume of product.