Besxar Builds Orbital Semiconductor Factory With SpaceX Rockets

Manufacturing in space and returning products to Earth currently relies on a narrow set of approaches: waiting for access to the International Space Station or partnering with select startups that launch spacecraft capable of returning payloads from orbit.

However, the most frequent round-trip vehicle between space and Earth is the SpaceX Falcon 9 booster, which completed 163 such missions last year and has already flown over 100 times this year. A new startup claims it has secured an agreement with Musk’s company to prototype an orbital semiconductor factory across multiple booster flights.

Besxar, founded by former OpenAI employee Ashley Pilipiszyn, aims to produce key semiconductor precursors by leveraging the vacuum of space. A major reason terrestrial chip fabrication requires massive infrastructure is the need for pressurized clean rooms to exclude microscopic dust and contaminants that can ruin chips during production. Pilipiszyn argues that next-generation rockets offer a viable alternative to this costly infrastructure. To pursue this, she has raised nearly $14 million, including a $9 million seed round led by Dauntless Ventures and Overture VC.

“We are at a point where it is more cost-effective to utilize environments where physics already works,” she told TechCrunch. “Avoid doing it on Earth, where you are constantly fighting against physical constraints.”

The company’s initial two “fabships”—compact canisters designed to transport and test semiconductor materials in orbit—launched on a Starlink mission in July. These tests aimed to verify that the canisters could withstand launch, protect wafer samples from contamination, and expose them to the space vacuum. Besxar achieved these objectives despite a flight data system malfunction in one canister, which the company is currently investigating.

“The flown samples were the cleanest and contained the least particulate matter compared to … non-flown terrestrial wafers, which is excellent for our scaling efforts,” Pilipiszyn told TechCrunch.

Besxar plans to iterate over the next two years, with the ultimate goal of deploying larger fabrication units on vehicles like SpaceX’s Starship, its next-generation rocket still under development. Pilipiszyn first approached SpaceX three years ago to discuss purchasing Starship flights, eventually settling on the booster payload deal as a strategy to de-risk her technology in the interim. The next steps involve heating wafers, then depositing one material, followed by two materials, and so on.

Once producing qualification samples, Besxar—named after “beskar,” the metal used in Star Wars to create Mandalorian armor—aims to supply leading chipmakers with wafers used to manufacture advanced chips that regulate electrical power in data centers, robots, and electric vehicles.

Several companies, including United Semiconductors and Space Forge, are working to leverage the space environment for higher-quality semiconductors, but all face the same challenge: the limited capacity to return significant volumes of product. Pilipiszyn expects to scale up to hundreds, and eventually thousands, of wafers per fab, a path that depends on affordable rocket access. This, in turn, requires SpaceX to operationalize Starship or for competitors like Rocket Lab and Stoke Space to launch their own next-generation rockets.

“We believe there is now a robust transport layer, allowing us to focus on the application layer,” she told TechCrunch. “We can concentrate on core manufacturing and getting our products back to Earth for market as quickly as possible.”