Besxar, a startup founded by former OpenAI employee Ashley Pilipiszyn, aims to produce precursor materials for advanced semiconductors by harnessing the vacuum of space. The company has reached an agreement with SpaceX to develop orbital semiconductor factory prototypes over approximately a dozen flights aboard Falcon 9 boosters. Falcon 9 boosters traveled to space and returned to Earth 163 times last year, and have already completed more than 100 flights this year.
Chip factories on Earth require pressurized clean rooms to prevent particles from damaging chips during production. Pilipiszyn argues that the vacuum of space could provide an alternative to this infrastructure. Besxar has raised approximately $14 million for this purpose, including a $9 million seed investment led by Dauntless Ventures and Overture VC.
The first two small capsules, which the company calls “fabships” and which carry and test semiconductor materials in orbit, flew on a Starlink mission in July. The capsules were intended to withstand launch, protect wafer samples from contamination and expose them to the vacuum of space. Although one capsule experienced a failure in its flight data system, Besxar reported that the samples were the cleanest and contained the fewest particles compared with unflown wafers kept on the ground.
Besxar will continue its experiments over the next two years; in subsequent stages, it plans to heat the wafers and add one, then two and more layers of material to them. The ultimate goal is to fly larger factories on vehicles such as SpaceX’s Starship, which is still under development, and supply manufacturers with wafers that will be used in chips providing power management for data centers, robots and electric vehicles. The company’s name comes from “beskar,” the metal of Mandalorian armor in the “Star Wars Legends” comics. United Semiconductors and Space Forge are also pursuing similar work; however, returning their products to Earth in meaningful quantities is a common challenge. Besxar’s goal of producing hundreds, then thousands, of wafers depends on low-cost rockets; this requires SpaceX’s Starship to enter service or Rocket Lab and Stoke Space to develop their next-generation rockets.
Why it matters
This approach raises the prospect of an alternative production environment to the cleanroom infrastructure on Earth used for particle control in semiconductor manufacturing. The issue could particularly affect manufacturers concerned with the material supply for chips providing power management in data centers, robots and electric vehicles. However, obtaining clean samples does not mean that more complex stages, such as heating them in orbit and adding multiple layers, can also be carried out with the same reliability. The fundamental challenge Besxar will face is scaling its technical experiments up to hundreds or thousands of wafers that manufacturers can use and bringing them back to Earth economically. For this reason, the venture’s plan depends not only on production technology but also on the development of affordable launch capacity.
Background
SpaceX is not a new name in the FikirPilot archive: we have published 2 news articles mentioning this name in the last 90 days; the most recent is dated August 30, 2026.
Term: semiconductor
A semiconductor is a material that conducts electricity depending on conditions and is fundamental to processor manufacturing; in the industry, design, manufacturing, and packaging are generally handled by separate companies.