It’s the day after Donald Trump declared his election victory, and a tech scout for NATO is peering down at a miniature factory, the size of a shoebox, designed to manufacture semiconductors in space.
Chris O’Connor, with his black bomber jacket and military haircut, has spent the past year scouring Europe for companies that will give NATO a technological edge over Russia and China—a job that has become even more urgent in the past 36 hours as the region rushes to prepare for Trump 2.0. Here, in a gray industrial estate on the outskirts of Cardiff in Wales, he believes he’s found one.
Space Forge wants to send satellites equipped with tiny clean rooms into space, where they’ll grow semiconductor crystals before transporting them safely back to Earth.
One 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 overcrowded with freshly-hired staff. Bacon says he is more interested in making chargers for electric cars to fight climate change, and Space Forge’s potential to exorcize all polluting industries from the planet.
But O’Connor is here because Space Forge has piqued the interest of the €1 billion ($1bn) NATO Innovation Fund (NIF). Manufacturing semiconductors in space, where there is no dirt, air, or gravity, has the potential to provide efficiencies that could create superior versions of military tools such as radar.
“The distance that radar can cover—translating to what it can see and how quickly it can do that—can be dramatically improved by using these materials,” O’Connor says, explaining why Space Forge was among the NIF’s first six investments to be made public.
Alongside Space Forge, the one-year-old NIF’s investments include battlefield robots, a company manufacturing a lighter version of the carbon fiber used to build cars and rockets, and several space startups.
This is 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 made semiconductor material in space. The only time the company attempted to launch its satellites, the Virgin Orbit rocket giving them a ride failed 177 km above Earth before crashing into the ocean. O’Connor, one of three partners at the fund, is sanguine about the fact there is no guarantee the investments will work out. “We’ve been given a mandate to go take this risk,” he says.