Space Forge is on a mission to manufacture semiconductors in space—no humans required. And on Wednesday the U.K.-based aerospace startup announced that it had taken a major step toward that goal by creating plasma, or superheated gas, aboard a commercial satellite for the first time.
Semiconductors require extremely precise conditions to make, and both NASA and industry groups have argued that the microgravity environment of space is better for their manufacturing than that of Earth. The reasons why are varied, but part of it has to do with how silicon behaves in such an environment—it’s just easier to get the material to adhere to the structure needed to make a semiconductor.
Indeed, Space Forge’s feat builds off previous work done on the International Space Station, says Clayton Swope, deputy director of the Aerospace Security Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a think tank.
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“The key difference here is that this was done uncrewed, without any people, on an entirely commercial spacecraft,” he says. “This demonstration shows that semiconductor crystal manufacturing can happen in space just using machines.”
“Keeping people alive in space is expensive,” Swope adds. “If machines can do that work instead, it brings down the cost of doing manufacturing in space.”
Space Forge CEO Joshua Western said in a press release that the company’s work proves that the right environment for semiconductor manufacturing “can be achieved on a dedicated, commercial satellite—opening the door to a completely new manufacturing frontier.” Space Forge launched its satellite, ForgeStar-1, in June. Its microwave-sized factory includes a furnace that the company showed reached temperatures of around 1,832 degrees Fahrenheit (1,000 degrees Celsius).
Other companies and research teams are getting in on the budding space manufacturing industry. In 2024 another startup, Varda Space Industries, demonstrated that it was possible to grow crystals of ritonavir, an antiviral drug, on an uncrewed commercial spacecraft and return them to Earth. And researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich recently 3D-printed human tissues in microgravity.
In-space manufacturing is in its “early days,” Libby Jackson, head of space at the Science Museum in England, told the BBC. But testing and proving technology like Space Forge’s “really opens the door for an economically viable product, where things can be made in space and return to Earth and have use and benefit to everybody on Earth.”