High above the clouds, beyond gravity, a new kind of factory is taking shape. One that doesn’t hum beside highways or belch smoke into the sky. Instead, it floats in orbit, suspended in microgravity, where atoms settle with a precision impossible on Earth.
Space Forge, a British aerospace manufacturing company, is planning to create ‘factories’ in space for manufacturing materials to produce semiconductors. The manufactured goods are to be used in quantum computing, AI data centres and defence infrastructures.
Located in Cardiff, Wales, the company has reached a key milestone on its way to creating ultra-high-quality crystal ‘seeds’ in space solely for the creation of semiconductors back on Earth.
The company launched ‘ForgeStar-1’ in June last year, into orbit with the help from SpaceX. Although it was built in one week, it took around two and a half years to obtain the license to launch it. It was able to generate plasma, which allowed the production of advanced crystals in the future.
Joshua Western, the CEO and co-founder of Space Forge, considers space as an unparalleled industrial base in comparison to Earth. He further explained by saying that atoms of the materials are arranged more regularly when manufactured under the conditions of microgravity.
He added that the space vacuum reduces the amount and likelihood of contamination. This allows for the production of semiconductor crystals to be ‘hundreds or thousands times purer’ than being produced on the ground.
With the launch of ForgeStar-1, Space Forge is looking forward to commercialising the entire system within the next two years. “Our core markets right now are aerospace, defence, telecommunications and data,” said Western.
Where the company will be producing high-quality versions of compounds that already exist on Earth, Western said these could be worth in the tens of millions of dollars per kilogram.
If successful, these orbit-born materials could redefine the limits of semiconductor performance and reshape the economics and geopolitics of manufacturing itself. Because in space, there are no borders and in the race to build the next generation of computing power, that may prove to be both an opportunity and a challenge.
