One small step for chips, one giant leap for a lack of impurities:
A team from Cardiff, Wales, is experimenting with the feasibility of building semiconductors in space, and its most recent success is another step forward towards its goal. According to the BBC, Space Forge's microwave-sized furnace has been switched on in space and has reached 1,000°C (1,832°F) — one of the most important parts of the manufacturing process that the company needs to validate in space.
"This is so important because it's one of the core ingredients that we need for our in-space manufacturing process," Payload Operations Lead Veronica Vera told the BBC. "So being able to demonstrate this is amazing." Semiconductor manufacturing is a costly and labor-intensive endeavor on Earth, and while putting it in orbit might seem far more complicated, making chips in space offers some theoretical advantages. For example, microgravity conditions would help the atoms in semiconductors line up perfectly, while the lack of an atmosphere would also reduce the chance of contaminants affecting the wafer.
These two things would help reduce imperfections in the final wafer output, resulting in a much more efficient fab. "The work that we're doing now is allowing us to create semiconductors up to 4,000 times purer in space than we can currently make here today," Space Forge CEO Josh Western told the publication. "This sort of semiconductor would go on to be in the 5G tower in which you get your mobile phone signal, it's going to be in the car charger you plug an EV into, it's going to be in the latest planes."
Space Forge launched its first satellite in June 2025, hitching a ride on the SpaceX Transporter-14 rideshare mission. However, it still took the company several months before it finally succeeded in turning on its furnace, showing how complicated this project can get. Nevertheless, this advancement is quite promising, with Space Forge planning to build a bigger space factory with the capacity to output 10,000 chips. Aside from that, it also needs to work on a way to bring the finished products back to the surface. Other companies are also experimenting with orbital fabs, with U.S. startup Besxar planning to send "Fabships" into space on Falcon 9 booster rockets.
Putting semiconductor manufacturing in space could help reduce the massive amounts of power and water that these processes require from our resources while also outputting more wafers with fewer impurities. However, we also have to consider the huge environmental impact of launching multiple rockets per day just to deliver the raw materials and pick up the finished products from orbit.
(Score: 5, Funny) by AgTiger on Saturday January 03, @07:39PM (9 children)
Sky high prices for memory weren't enough? The sky is no longer the limit?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday January 03, @09:26PM (8 children)
(Score: 3, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Saturday January 03, @10:07PM (7 children)
>it'll lower the bar for a more sustainable presence in space.
Only if it's profitable long term.
Lack of high performance RAM chips isn't what's holding back sustainable presence in space.
🌻🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday January 04, @03:18PM (6 children)
It's one of many things, sure. But every so often I see arguments that space colonies can't be truly self-sufficient because they'll rely on high tech shipments from Earth.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Sunday January 04, @03:46PM (5 children)
>But every so often I see arguments that space colonies can't be truly self-sufficient because they'll rely on high tech shipments from Earth.
The thing about "high tech" is that, it's "high" - built on the shoulders of armies of giants. Building one gee-whiz higher tech gadget doesn't get you the rest for free. You can trade your "zero G produced unobtanium" with the mud dwellers for the rest of their "high tech" stuff you need, but you're never going to reproduce the infrastructure to get it all.
Personally, I believe that a colony of asteroid miners could work themselves into self-sufficiency within a century or less, just by relying on what they can do independently and weaning themselves off of all the mudball based tech. There would be quite a long "bootstrap" period where the mud-tech enables development of independent works in space, but only the monumentally lazy-stupid would continue to rely on shipments of fresh strawberries from the surface when they can develop a greenhouse in which to grow their own.
🌻🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday January 04, @03:56PM (4 children)
We have an existence proof that the infrastructure can be built. Sure, I don't expect a bunch of small colonies to replicate that. But what if it doesn't stay small? Then you have the conditions needed to reproduce the infrastructure. What can be done once can be done again.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday January 04, @05:33PM (3 children)
>We have an existence proof that the infrastructure can be built.
By a population of billions with resources many trillions of times as vast in a cumulative process taking centuries, sure.
>What can be done once can be done again.
And I agree with that - after about a century of sustained heavy support.
If you call 1492 "go" date for wooden ships, canvas and rudimentary metalworking, it took us from then until the 1960s before we could move one meatbag safely into orbit. 470-ish years.
If we got serious about continuously sustaining industry above LEO in the 2030s, I wouldn't be surprised for it to be self-sustaining by 2150. I might be surprised if we sustained industry above LEO for more than 10 years at a stretch the first 3 times we give it a serious shot.
🌻🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 05, @06:06AM
There's also fossil fuels. Rebooting to orbital tech would probably still be doable even with 10% the amount but if it was a lot less it might be harder to reboot.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday January 05, @01:30PM (1 child)
Existence proof checks the box just the same - and you need to think about what "trillions" means - the output of one productive person in the modern age would be on the order of a trillionth the output of humanity from 1492 to present. We certainly can put out a colony significantly larger than one person.
And haven't we developed a bit of technology since 1492? We might not be starting from the same point anymore.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday January 05, @01:32PM
FTFM.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by VLM on Saturday January 03, @09:51PM (6 children)
You might be surprised to learn the innards of a deposition machine might run 10-9 torr which is a pretty darn good vacuum, but ISS level orbit is also like 10-9 torr. Its lower on the moon, especially at night, but not by that much.
Nothing really changes. The innards of a century old vacuum tube are ALSO like 10-9 torr
There's also "Weird Stuff" floating around in orbit whereas at least on earth they can sorta control what outgasses.
I "think" that the meme of processing semiconductors in orbital vacuum came from the bad old days before the EPA or maybe around the early EPA days where just dumping arsenic vapor from the roughing pump out the window is no longer cool in the USA but in orbit or on the moon we could just shit it all up and try to turn the entire universe into a toxic waste dump. I don't think this would be considered "cool" as living in space is rough enough without your suit being vapor deposited with F only knows what before you re-enter the airlock.
I mean yeah there's cool things you can do with infinite free vacuum WRT industry, but I donno if dumping semiconductor toxic waste for "free" into orbit is the best idea. But the meme will apparently never die, so ...
(Score: 4, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Saturday January 03, @10:12PM (5 children)
>There's also "Weird Stuff" floating around in orbit
Yeah, but cracking open a valve to get 10-9 Torr is certainly a lesser engineering challenge than what's required to maintain that in a near sealevel furnace chamber... So, they'll still have to use some care to "keep it clean" but relatively speaking, saying 10-9 is "easy" is like saying a 2 mile deep submersible is "easy" to keep dry air inside. Yeah, been there, done that, but all in all, dry air is easier to come by in the desert, even if it's not perfectly clean and you have to filter a bit of dust.
I think the whole point of semiconductors in space is the zero-g crystal growth - unobtainium down on the surface.
🌻🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 04, @02:24AM (4 children)
One tricky bit is getting rid of vibrations. So maybe that's an advantage in orbit - no earthquakes or tremors. It might be easier to isolate stuff from vibrations too.
As for the massive amounts of water. How do you reduce the need of that? You need the tons of ultra pure water to clean stuff. If you are going to do that bit in space then that seems difficult to me.
(Score: 3, Informative) by JoeMerchant on Sunday January 04, @02:33AM (3 children)
>You need the tons of ultra pure water to clean stuff. If you are going to do that bit in space then that seems difficult to me.
I'm just gonna swag that they "do it differently in Space" - something about that 1000C furnace probably cleans things up a bit... plus, any part of the process they could "clean up" before packaging to launch could leave the water on the ground. Finally, as long as the crystals grow clean and stay clean until they get opened up for further processing... again, the mass quantities of water aren't likely to be launched.
Lack of vibration sources and lack of significant gravitational force would seem to be the killer quantities of being "up there."
We have a process that makes sub-millimeter repeated measurements with a robot arm and it's super touchy about vibrations from the neighbors, so much so that we just bought out their lease so we could store a bunch of nice quiet boxes in their space instead of a bunch of people driving up, parking, opening doors, walking, etc.
🌻🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 04, @03:03AM
as for the furnace, they can heat stuff up on the ground to those temperatures too. don't see how being in orbit would make the results purer.
(Score: 1) by pTamok on Sunday January 04, @03:25PM (1 child)
I think the LIGO experiments reduce vibrations to exceedingly low levels:
https://www.ligo.caltech.edu/page/vibration-isolation [caltech.edu]
Advanced LIGO two-stage twelve-axis vibration isolation and positioning platform. Part 1: Design and production overview [sciencedirect.com]
So it might well be possible to reduce vibrations down to the necessary levels on Earth. Note that thermal effects on satellites can give all sorts of vibrations from expansions and contractions, as can valves in station-keeping propulsion systems and vibrations from aspect-controlling gyroscopes (if used).
What you can't do on Earth is microgravity for long periods. Tossing a ball vertically in the air means the ball experiences microgravity about the apogee of its trajectory, and a trip on the Vomit Comet [wikipedia.org] gives microgravity for longer ("free fall") in its parabolic dive, but neither are long enough for sustained crystal growth.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Sunday January 04, @03:52PM
The cool thing about microgravity, vacuum and vibrations is:
If you've got your furnace "isolated" - floating on thin slack tethers, that's something you can do in microgravity a lot easier than in the well. Then, even as your station gyros and valves and toilet flush air jets vibrate the walls, as long as the suspension system can remain in the slack zone, you've got amazingly good isolation from station vibration. If necessary, the isolator can also be evacuated of air pressure to further reduce transmission of vibrations into the "manufacturing chamber."
A/C above seems to be stubbornly missing the point that crystals growing in microgravity have different structures than crystals grown in a gravity well. Presumably, some of these different structures are more desirable for semi-conductor use - more uniform and symmetric I believe is what TFA was saying.
🌻🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 4, Interesting) by anubi on Saturday January 03, @10:10PM (1 child)
Looks to me we have an endless supply of heat. ( The Sun and Spin-stabilized Parabolic mirrors ) .
The whole factory may not rotate...just the mirror. Maybe ion engines to keep the mirror aimed at the sun to provide processional force to keep it centered on the sun through it's "yearly" orbit.
We can recondense the water ( blackbody radiators ).
Looks like our energy demands are met. The actual material needs appear minimal and a "Space Jitney" looks practical for logistics.
This looks like the start of an interesting design as we do have enough need for the economies of scale to apply. We have to develop the technology to use it.
It looks like it will be very sensitive to gravitational fields and will need to have its own solar orbit to get away from Earth's gravity.
I would not be surprised if the Rotation of the Milky Way Galaxy shows up as a fudge factor, as even the minutest warp in spacetime ( gravity ) will cause aiming drift, or we may find electrostatic charges interacting with the solar wind sufficient to keep everything lined up.
This could get very interesting, as we learn to build things atom-by-atom.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 4, Informative) by JoeMerchant on Saturday January 03, @10:15PM
> a "Space Jitney" looks practical for logistics.
Apparently the return vehicle for the finished product is a significant concern for them - enough to sketch a prototype to test at least.
🌻🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by schroeder on Sunday January 04, @06:02PM
"Space Forge" sounds like the inevitably evil space exploration/mining company from a Doom remake.