Welsh startup Space Forge was tucked in a corner of the Goodwood Festival of Speed Future Lab building when I visited recently.
Its stand was quiet, with most of the visitors congregating around AMECA, the eerily looking lifelike humanoid presented by British company, Engineering Arts in partnership with the National Robotarium.
What Space Forge does though, underpins everything that Goodwood represents: technology in motion and it couldn’t be more exciting – here’s why.
In the beginning was the seed
Every chip found in any electronic device – such as a robot – is likely to contain a metalloid, the most common being Silicon. A silicon chip will have been produced from a wafer that is obtained by slicing through a silicon ingot using diamond blades. That ingot, any ingot, is obtained from a seed.
The purer the crystal seed, the better the wafer. That’s what Joshua Western, the CEO and co-founder of Space Forge calls, ultra-high quality semiconductor substrates. This expertise, one observer told me anonymously, will attract a lot of attention from one particular deep-pocketed line of business: the military.
في May 2025, NATO Innovation Fund was the lead investor in a round that included World Fund, Business Business Bank and NSSIF and injected about $30 million funding.
For now though, the only public customer (and investor) Space Forge acknowledged is BT. “Space-made amplifiers can more than halve the total cell tower consumption”, Space Forge wrote on its website.
Over a decade and scaled up to the country’s estimated fleet of cell towers by 2035, that’s about 4.3 million tons of CO2 being saved – the equivalent to the CO2 emission of about one million ICE cars.
Producing these materials in space has plenty of opportunities but also some incredible challenges (like space radiation).
Space as a manufacturing powerhouse
In low Earth orbit, quasi perfect vacuum, microgravity, near absolute zero make it easier to produce seeds 10x purer than anything found on Earth, which Space Forge claims will lead to semiconductor materials that have one-hundredth the amount of defects of their Earthly counterparts.
This feeds a virtuous circle: fewer defects leads to lower costs (less wastage), higher efficiency, higher performance for same power consumption or similar performance with much lower power consumption.
It’s not just about making existing materials better. It’s also about blending metals in a way that’s simply not possible on Earth to produce new alloys and superalloys or non-metals (ceramics for example) to produce novel composites and compounds.
The trillion-dollar pharmaceutical industry is a great fit as well with promises of vastly improved shelf life and better drug delivery methods. And let’s not get started on the food industry that could see significant breakthroughs as well. In-spatium meat anyone?
“We have only three rivals in the world because semiconductors are very difficult to make in space”, Western told me in the sweltering heat of Chichester, grinning, not because of the hot weather, but because ForgeStar 1, the company’s in-space manufacturing plant, was successfully launched end of June 2025.
The future of space manufacturing
ForgeStar is built to be reusable and sustainable but not mass scalable: the current rate of production of crystal seeds in the hundreds of grams but economies of scale will drive down the cost of operating costs while competition between the likes of SpaceX, Blue Origin and other private space companies will help reduce launch costs.
Joshua wouldn’t be drawn into making predictions about the future of Space Forge, but gave us a clue about the direction of travel. “We want to be a platform for others to come and work on”. That platform has a name: Microgravity-as-a-service.
That business model is vaguely similar to Arm’s licensing one: whereas Arm sold licenses to produce billions of chips, Space Forge will book slots for partners to produce their own mother (kombucha), seed (plant) or starter (sourdough).
Allowing others to work on its platform will bring in sustained revenue sources while increasing its market share ahead of any future new competitor. “We are only involved in four of the 100s of processes that are needed to produce a chip”, Western told me.
There’s also the distinct possibility that a foundry giant like TSMC, سامسونج Foundry or Global Foundries, will take a fancy at this budding Welsh digital dragon. Ultra pure ingots will come in handy as a useful USP due to the higher cost of production and diminishing returns from ever-shrinking lithographies.
“What’s your biggest challenge right now?”, I asked Western as we ended our impromptu meeting.
“We have 40 other companies chasing this market – but my biggest challenge remains red tape”, he acknowledged – a common theme so many startups will be familiar with.
