Besxar wants to build chip fabs in orbit using SpaceX rockets

Besxar, a startup founded by former OpenAI staffer Ashley Pilipiszyn, wants to manufacture key precursors for advanced semiconductors by exploiting the vacuum of space — and it has talked SpaceX into letting it prototype an orbital semiconductor factory across a dozen flights of the company’s Falcon 9 rocket booster. The booster made that round trip 163 times last year and has already flown more than 100 times this year, more often than any other spacecraft that returns to Earth.

Chip fabs on Earth require enormous pressurized clean rooms to keep out microscopic dust and contaminants that could ruin a chip during production. Pilipiszyn argues that new-generation rockets can offer an alternative. “We’re at a time where it’s actually more cost-effective to go where the physics already works,” she told TechCrunch. “Don’t do it on Earth where you’re fighting physics.” To pursue that bet, she has raised almost $14 million, including a $9 million seed round led by Dauntless Ventures and Overture VC.

The company’s first two “fabships” — small canisters designed to carry and test semiconductor materials in orbit — flew on a July Starlink mission to prove they could survive launch, protect wafer samples from contamination, and expose them to the vacuum of space. Besxar says it met those objectives despite a flight-data-system malfunction in one canister, which it is still investigating. Pilipiszyn said the flown samples had less particulate matter than nonflown terrestrial wafers.

Besxar expects to keep iterating over the next two years, aiming eventually to fly larger fabs aboard a vehicle like SpaceX’s Starship, still in development. Pilipiszyn first approached SpaceX three years ago about buying Starship flights and settled on the booster-payload deal to de-risk the technology in the meantime. Next steps include heating the wafers, then depositing one material on them, then two, and so on. Once producing qualification samples, Besxar — named for “beskar,” the fictional metal used to make Mandalorian armor — wants to supply chipmakers with wafers for the advanced chips that regulate electrical power in data centers, robots, and electric vehicles. Rivals including United Semiconductors and Space Forge face the same challenge: returning a meaningful volume of product, a constraint that depends on cheap rockets from SpaceX’s Starship or competitors like Rocket Lab and Stoke Space reaching orbit with their own next-generation vehicles.

Why it matters

Besxar’s bet shows how the falling cost of reusable rocket flights is starting to make space itself a viable manufacturing input, not just a destination — provided the launch supply keeps up.