Besxar straps orbital chip fab prototypes onto SpaceX Falcon 9 boosters

Besxar, a startup founded by former OpenAI staffer Ashley Pilipiszyn, has persuaded SpaceX to let it prototype an orbital semiconductor factory across a dozen Falcon 9 booster flights. The company wants to manufacture key precursors for advanced semiconductors in the vacuum of space, arguing that the environment itself can replace the pressurized clean rooms that make terrestrial chip fabs enormously expensive infrastructure projects. Pilipiszyn first approached SpaceX three years ago to discuss buying flights on Starship, the company's next-generation rocket still in development, and eventually settled on the booster payload arrangement as a way to de-risk the technology.

The pitch rests on a simple observation about how often SpaceX hardware already makes the round trip. A Falcon 9 booster flew to space and back 163 times last year and has already flown more than 100 times this year, making it the vehicle that returns to Earth more frequently than any other. That cadence gives Besxar a repeatable, relatively cheap path to orbit and back, an alternative to waiting for the International Space Station or partnering with the handful of startups that launch spacecraft spending time in orbit before returning.

Besxar has raised almost $14 million to pursue the idea, including a $9 million seed round led by Dauntless Ventures and Overture VC. Pilipiszyn frames the economics in terms of working with, rather than against, the environment. "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."

The company's first two "fabships," small canisters designed to carry and test semiconductor materials in orbit, flew on a July Starlink mission. The flight was meant to prove the canisters could survive a launch, protect wafer samples from contamination, and expose them to the vacuum of space. Besxar says it met all three objectives despite a malfunction in the flight data system of one canister, which the company is currently investigating.

Pilipiszyn reported that the flown samples came back cleaner than the control wafers that never left the ground. "The flown samples were the cleanest and had the least amount of particulate matter compared to non-flown terrestrial wafers, which is fantastic for us as we scale up," she told TechCrunch. The result is central to the company's thesis: that space itself can outperform the elaborate filtration systems terrestrial fabs rely on to keep microscopic dust and contaminants from ruining chips during production.

Besxar expects to keep iterating over the next two years, with the ultimate goal of flying larger fabs onboard a vehicle like Starship. The company has not disclosed the terms of its booster deal with SpaceX, the timeline for the remaining flights, or which semiconductor precursors it intends to produce first. The July mission validated the canister design at small scale, but the step from test canisters to production-scale fabrication in orbit remains unproven, and the company's own flight data system failure shows the hardware still needs work.