Besxar, a startup founded by former OpenAI researcher Ashley Pilipiszyn, has completed its first flight test of hardware designed to make semiconductors in the vacuum of space. The mission flew July 5 on a SpaceX Falcon 9 carrying Starlink satellites, with semiconductor wafers in Besxar-built canisters alongside samples for researchers at the University of Virginia and the University of Texas at Austin.
The flight proved the canisters could let the vacuum in while keeping out contamination, including atomic oxygen in low Earth orbit, and that the wafers survived launch and re-entry aboard the returning booster. Besxar says the test gives it flight heritage for its fabships, small canisters designed to carry and process semiconductor materials in orbit.
Besxar has raised almost $14M, including a $9M seed round led by Dauntless Ventures and Overture VC. SpaceX is under contract to fly 12 missions for the company, and the second is expected before the end of the year. Pilipiszyn argues space offers what Earth fabs buy with billions in pumps and pressurized clean rooms: a ready-made vacuum. It is more cost-effective to go where the physics already works, she told TechCrunch.
For the deep-tech ecosystem, the demo is an early data point on whether orbital manufacturing can move beyond experiments toward real wafer processing, and whether the chip supply chain will ever include a stop in low Earth orbit.
