It’s the day after Donald Trump declared his election victory, and a technical scout for NATO stared at a miniature factory the size of a shoebox designed to make semiconductors in space.
Chris O’Connor, in his black bomber jacket and military haircut, has spent the past year scouting for companies in Europe that will give NATO a technological advantage over Russia and China – a job that has become even more urgent in the past 36 hours, as as the region rushes to prepare for Trump 2.0. Here, in a gray industrial area on the outskirts of Cardiff in Wales, he believes he has found one.
Space Forge wants to send satellites equipped with small clean rooms into space, where they will grow semiconductor crystals before transporting them safely back to Earth.
A single Space Forge satellite could eventually create enough semiconductor material to power tens of thousands of phones, estimates chief technology officer Andrew Bacon, speaking in an office crowded with newly hired employees. Bacon says he’s more interested in making electric car chargers to combat climate change and the Space Forge’s potential to drive all polluting industries off the planet.
But O’Connor is here because Space Forge attracted the interest of the €1 billion ($1 billion) NATO Innovation Fund (NIF). Manufacturing semiconductors in space, where there is no dirt, air or gravity, has the potential to deliver efficiencies that could create superior versions of military tools like radar.
“The distance that the radar can cover—meaning what it can see and how fast it can do it—can be dramatically improved by using these materials,” O’Connor says, explaining why Space Forge was among the top six investments of NIF has gone public.
Along with Space Forge, the 1-year-old NIF’s investments include battlefield robots, a company making a lighter version of the carbon fiber used to build cars and rockets, and several space startups.
It’s the alliance’s first foray into the high-risk, high-reward world of venture capital, using its members’ money to fund the experiment. Space Forge has never actually produced semiconductor material in space. The only time the company tried to launch its satellites, the Virgin Orbit rocket carrying them failed 177 kilometers above Earth before crashing into the ocean. O’Connor, one of three partners in the fund, is optimistic about the fact that there is no guarantee that the investments will work. “We’ve been mandated to take that risk,” he says.
