A microwave-size factory now circling Earth is quietly testing whether the cleanest place to build the dirtiest part of modern life, the semiconductor, is not a billion dollar cleanroom on the ground but the vacuum of orbit. If it works, the chips that run everything from 2026 electric cars to AI data centers could be thousands of times purer than anything etched in silicon today, reshaping how I think about the geography and physics of the tech economy. The experiment is still early, but the physics behind it is simple, and brutally compelling.
From cleanrooms to cosmic vacuum
For decades, chipmakers have fought a losing battle against contamination, spending fortunes to filter air, scrub tools and suit workers in head to toe protection, all to keep stray particles from ruining nanometer scale features. Even the best cleanrooms still sit inside a thick, turbulent atmosphere, where gravity pulls dust, vapors and microscopic droplets into places they are not wanted, and every extra layer of filtration adds cost and complexity. The idea behind moving fabrication into orbit is to stop fighting that environment and instead step outside it entirely, using the near perfect vacuum and weightlessness of low Earth orbit as the ultimate cleanroom.
That logic is already being tested in hardware. One company has started Using what it calls “Fabships,” reusable platforms that ride to orbit, circle Earth, and then return with finished semiconductor material, treating space itself as the process chamber rather than a building full of ducts and filters on the ground. In parallel, a UK startup has literally shot a 1,000 degree furnace into orbit, turning a small satellite into a flying foundry to see whether wafers grown in microgravity emerge with fewer defects than anything that can be coaxed out of a terrestrial fab.
The microwave-size factory that lit its furnace in orbit
The most vivid proof that this is more than a thought experiment is a mission that looks, at first glance, almost comically modest: a microwave-sized box bolted to a small satellite, carrying a furnace hot enough to melt advanced alloys. The Cardiff based team behind it designed the package to be just big enough to host a high temperature chamber, power electronics and control systems, then launched it to orbit to see whether they could ignite and regulate a plasma in weightlessness. In other words, they wanted to know if a tiny, automated factory could survive the violence of launch, wake up in space and run a process that usually demands a building sized lab.
According to reporting on the mission, The Cardiff based startup Space Forge has successfully operated that furnace aboard its ForgeStar 1 satellite, proving that its onboard system can reach 1,832°F (1,000°C) and generate plasma in orbit. Separate coverage notes that Space Forge have sent a microwave sized factory into orbit and demonstrated that its furnace can be switched on, a small but crucial step toward producing higher performance electronics for communications infrastructure, computing and transport without ever touching the air.
Why microgravity is a gift for chipmakers
To understand why anyone would go to this trouble, I have to look at what gravity does to materials at the microscopic level. On Earth, molten metals, semiconductor melts and complex fluids are constantly tugged downward, which drives convection currents, density driven separation and slow but relentless sedimentation of heavier components. Those flows can introduce impurities, create uneven crystal growth and leave behind tiny structural flaws that later show up as electrical noise, heat or outright device failure in finished chips.
In orbit, those forces almost vanish. A detailed technical history of space manufacturing describes how a 3.5 m disk once deployed from the Space Shuttle was used to generate an ultra high vacuum in its wake, creating a platform where microgravity and near perfect emptiness allowed materials to solidify without the usual gravitational distortions. That same analysis explains why microgravity matters for semiconductors, arguing that the absence of buoyancy driven flows and sedimentation can yield a higher quality of output, with more uniform crystals and fewer defects baked in from the start.
How a 1,000°C furnace behaves when “up” disappears
Running a 1,000°C furnace in orbit is not just a stunt, it is a way to probe how extreme heat and microgravity interact when there is no clear “up” for hot gases to rise toward. On Earth, a furnace that reaches 1,832°F relies on convection to move heat around, with hotter, lighter air or plasma rising and cooler material sinking, a circulation pattern that engineers can model and control. In orbit, that natural circulation collapses, so the only way to move heat is through conduction and carefully engineered flows, which could make temperature gradients both more stable and more tunable for delicate processes like crystal growth.
The UK company behind the orbital furnace is explicit about that goal. A widely shared discussion of the mission notes that a UK company shoots a 1,000 degree furnace into space to study off world chip manufacturing, with the Dec launch framed as a test of whether semiconductors made in space can reach levels of purity and performance that are impossible on the ground. The same effort is tied back to Space Forge’s ForgeStar 1 platform, which has already shown that its onboard furnace can reach 1,000°C and generate plasma in orbit, giving engineers real data on how high temperature processes behave when gravity is no longer stirring the pot.
Fabships and the race to industrialize orbit
Space Forge is not alone in trying to turn orbit into an industrial park. Another venture has outlined a plan to build what it calls Fabships, reusable spacecraft that would carry raw materials to low Earth orbit, process them into high value semiconductor wafers or other advanced materials, and then bring the finished goods back through the atmosphere. The concept treats each spacecraft as a mobile factory, one that can be refurbished and relaunched rather than discarded, and that spends most of its life circling Earth in the quiet, ultra clean environment that chipmakers crave.
Reporting on this effort explains that the company is Using what it calls “Fabships,” with the platforms designed to launch as a reusable payload into orbit around Earth, produce semiconductor materials in microgravity, and then return them for use in terrestrial electronics manufacturing. The same coverage of computer chip manufacturing moving to space makes clear that these Fabships are not science fiction prototypes but part of a broader push to industrialize low Earth orbit, alongside smaller microwave sized factories and other specialized platforms that all exploit the same basic physics advantage.
What mayonnaise and space food teach me about microgravity
Some of the most revealing experiments about how materials behave in orbit have nothing to do with chips at all, and that is precisely why they matter. Researchers have been studying everyday substances like mayonnaise in space because these complex fluids, which are mixtures of oil, water and other components, are notoriously sensitive to gravity driven separation and aging. As one analysis puts it, Understanding exactly what happens inside these materials as they age has always been complicated by gravity, because even sitting still on a shelf, these substances settle, cluster and rearrange themselves in ways that are hard to untangle from the underlying physics.
In microgravity, those slow drifts and separations nearly stop, letting scientists watch how particles and droplets interact without the constant pull of weight. That same logic applies to semiconductor melts and doped materials, which are also mixtures that can settle, cluster and rearrange themselves under gravity in ways that introduce defects. Even seemingly unrelated work on astronaut diets reinforces how different the body and its fluids behave in orbit, with one account noting that Being in space diminishes astronauts’ sense of taste because On Earth, gravity pulls on fluids in the body, but in the microgravity of the ISS, those fluids flow freely, changing how the nose and mouth perceive flavor. If gravity can reshape something as subjective as taste, it is not hard to see how it might quietly sabotage the precision of a chip fab.
How much cleaner could space grown chips really be
The headline claim that space manufacturing could make chips 4,000 times cleaner sounds almost absurd until I look at what “cleaner” actually means in this context. In semiconductor fabrication, cleanliness is often measured in terms of defect density, the number of unwanted particles, dislocations or impurities per unit area or volume of material. If microgravity and ultra high vacuum can cut those defects by orders of magnitude, for example by eliminating convection driven contamination and gravitational settling of impurities, then a factor of thousands is not inherently impossible, even if the exact figure remains Unverified based on available sources.
What the current missions can verify is that the building blocks for such a leap are falling into place. The 3.5 m wake shield experiment from the Space Shuttle era showed that orbit can deliver an ultra high vacuum that rivals or exceeds the best terrestrial chambers, while ForgeStar 1 has proved that a microwave sized factory can run a 1,000°C plasma furnace in that environment. Fabships promise to scale those capabilities into reusable industrial platforms. If each of those steps reduces one major source of contamination, from airborne particles to convection driven mixing, the cumulative effect on defect density could be dramatic, even if the precise multiplier will only be known once full production runs are compared side by side with Earth grown wafers.
The hard economics of building fabs in orbit
Physics may be on the side of orbital manufacturing, but economics is not automatically so generous. Launching mass to orbit is still expensive, even as reusable rockets have driven costs down, and every kilogram of furnace, shielding and raw material that rides a rocket is a kilogram that cannot be used for payloads like satellites or scientific instruments. On top of that, any space grown chip or wafer has to survive reentry, recovery and integration into existing supply chains, all of which add risk and cost compared with shipping a wafer across a continent by truck.
The business case, then, hinges on whether the performance gains from ultra clean, microgravity grown materials justify those extra steps. Space Forge is betting that certain high value segments, such as power electronics for communications infrastructure, computing and transport, will pay a premium for components that run cooler, last longer or handle higher voltages because they were forged in orbit. The Fabships concept similarly targets niche, high margin products rather than commodity smartphone processors, at least initially, using the unique environment around Earth as a way to make things that simply cannot be made any other way.
Why this tiny factory matters for the future of tech
When I zoom out, the microwave sized factory and its 1,000°C furnace look less like a curiosity and more like a prototype for a new layer of the tech stack, one that sits physically above the cloud. If companies like Space Forge and the Fabship builders can prove that orbit grown materials deliver measurable, repeatable advantages, then chip design, data center planning and even national industrial policy will have to account for a supply chain that crosses the Kármán line. The same way hyperscale cloud reshaped how software is built and deployed, orbital fabs could reshape how hardware is conceived, with certain ultra demanding applications reserved for components literally made off world.
There is also a geopolitical dimension that I cannot ignore. Nations that control access to low Earth orbit, launch capacity and reentry corridors will have leverage over any industry that depends on space based manufacturing, just as countries with leading edge terrestrial fabs wield influence today. The early experiments, from the 3.5 m wake shield behind the Space Shuttle to the ForgeStar 1 plasma runs and the first Fabships circling Earth, are therefore not just scientific curiosities but early moves in a quiet race to claim the cleanest factory floor humanity has ever built, the thin shell of space just above our heads.
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