Besxar Says First Orbital Wafer Flights Produced Cleaner Samples

Besxar says wafer samples aboard its first two orbital prototypes had less particulate matter than its non-flown terrestrial comparison wafers. The result is an early signal for its central idea: using space vacuum, rather than an Earth-based clean room, to make semiconductor materials cleaner.

The two small canisters, called fabships, flew on a SpaceX Starlink mission in July. They were designed to test whether the containers could survive launch, protect wafers from contamination, and expose them to vacuum. Besxar says it achieved those goals, although one canister had a flight-data-system malfunction that it is investigating.

Replacing the clean room

Chip factories on Earth use pressurized clean rooms to keep out tiny particles that can disrupt production. Besxar is trying to use the vacuum of space instead. Its target is wafer material, not finished chips, for advanced power-regulation chips used in data centers, robots, and electric vehicles.

The company-reported particulate comparison is not yet proof of a commercial wafer process or of material that meets chipmaker qualification requirements. Besxar’s planned heating and deposition sequence marks the work still required between a contamination test and qualification samples.

Scaling depends on transport

Besxar has discussed prototyping an orbital semiconductor factory across about a dozen SpaceX booster flights and expects to keep iterating for the next two years. It has raised almost $14 million, including a $9 million seed round led by Dauntless Ventures and Overture VC.

What still has to work

• Increasingly complex heating and material-deposition work in orbit.
• Qualification samples that prospective chipmakers can assess.
• Launch and return capacity that can support hundreds, then thousands, of wafers per factory.

Besxar ultimately wants to fly larger factories on SpaceX Starship, which remains in development. It expects to scale from hundreds to thousands of wafers per factory, but says that path depends on cheaper rocket capacity.

The harder challenge is turning an encouraging materials result into a supply chain that can bring enough wafers back to Earth at a workable cost.