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New Wave | Hugo Rauch | Substack
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🌊 Manufacturing in Space
Why the next generation of advanced materials might be made 500 km above Earth.
We’re joined by Josh Western, co-founder and CEO of Space Forge, a UK company building spacecraft to manufacture advanced materials in space — and bring them back to Earth.
The idea sounds almost absurd at first.
Why launch something into orbit just to manufacture a few grams of material?
Because space gives manufacturers something Earth can’t: microgravity, ultra-high vacuum, and extreme temperatures. For certain advanced materials, especially compound semiconductors, those conditions could produce dramatically higher-quality crystals.
And Space Forge doesn’t need to manufacture an entire chip in orbit.
The company wants to produce the seed crystal in space, return it to Earth, then use conventional semiconductor infrastructure to scale it. Josh says one seed crystal could ultimately support the production of more than one million chips on Earth.
In our conversation, we covered:
→ Why Earth is actually a difficult place to manufacture ultra-pure materials
→ How a few grams produced in space could enable millions of semiconductor chips
→ Why Space Forge built both its own semiconductor reactor and reusable spacecraft
→ Whether launch costs actually break the economics of in-space manufacturing
→ Why regulation and customs may be a bigger bottleneck than technology
→ How better semiconductors could reduce energy consumption
→ Why Space Forge sees space manufacturing as part of Europe’s reindustrialisation
→ What could come after semiconductors: solar cells, metals, graphene and batteries
Perhaps the most interesting idea is that space doesn’t need to replace terrestrial manufacturing. It could simply become another industrial environment, used for the handful of manufacturing steps where Earth’s atmosphere and gravity become constraints.
Josh’s ambition is for that idea to eventually become boring.
Because by then, manufacturing materials in space would simply be another part of the industrial toolkit.
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