A young company is placing a manufacturing bet on the most reliable round-trip vehicle in spaceflight. Besxar wants to grow semiconductor materials in orbit, using SpaceX Falcon 9 boosters as its transport, and it argues the vacuum of space can replace the pressurized clean rooms that make chip fabs so costly.
Founder Ashley Pilipiszyn, who previously worked at OpenAI, points out that terrestrial fabs spend enormous sums keeping microscopic dust away from wafers, while orbit arrives dust-free by default. What space lacked was a ride that goes up and comes back often. Falcon 9 boosters made that round trip 163 times last year and more than 100 times so far in 2026.
Besxar has raised nearly $14M, including a $9M seed round from Dauntless Ventures and Overture VC. Two prototype canisters it calls fabships flew on a Starlink mission in July, carrying wafer samples to test launch survival and contamination resistance. One unit suffered a flight-data glitch, but the material that returned showed less particulate contamination than identical wafers stored on Earth, the company says.
Next steps add heat to the wafers in orbit, then deposition of one material, then two, building toward qualification samples for chipmakers that produce power-regulating silicon for data centers, robots and electric vehicles. Pilipiszyn, who named the venture after the Star Wars metal beskar, plans larger hardware on vehicles like Starship, since scaling to hundreds or thousands of wafers per flight depends on cheap launch capacity.
United Semiconductors and Space Forge are chasing the same opportunity, and every player faces the same bottleneck: getting meaningful volumes of product back down to Earth.
