Besxar Tests 2 Orbital Fabships on Starlink Mission, Raising $14 Million
Updated
Updated · TechCrunch · Sep 9
Besxar Tests 2 Orbital Fabships on Starlink Mission, Raising $14 Million
2 articles · Updated · TechCrunch · Sep 9
Summary
Two Besxar fabships flew on a July Starlink mission and met their main goals: surviving launch, shielding wafer samples from contamination and exposing them to the vacuum of space.
The startup said the returned samples were cleaner and carried less particulate matter than comparable terrestrial wafers, though one canister suffered a flight-data-system malfunction now under investigation.
Besxar, founded by former OpenAI staffer Ashley Pilipiszyn, has raised nearly $14 million, including a $9 million seed round, to turn space vacuum into a manufacturing environment for semiconductor precursors.
Over the next 2 years, the company plans to heat wafers and deposit materials in orbit across about a dozen booster flights before aiming for larger factories on Starship.
That scale-up hinges on cheaper reusable rockets and enough return capacity, a bottleneck also facing rivals such as Space Forge and United Semiconductors.
Will the astronomical costs of rocket launches ultimately outweigh the financial savings of manufacturing advanced semiconductors in the vacuum of space?
How will startups protect delicate semiconductor wafers from extreme cosmic radiation and temperature swings while orbiting Earth at hypersonic speeds?