It’s the day after Donald Trump declared his election victory, and a NATO technology scout observes a miniature factory, the size of a shoe box, designed to make semiconductors in space.
Chris O’Connor, with his black jacket and military haircut, has spent the past year scouring Europe in search of companies that will give NATO a technological advantage over Russia and China, a task that has become even more urgent in the last 36 hours as the region rushes to prepare for Trump 2.0. Here, on a gray industrial estate on the outskirts of Cardiff, 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 to Earth.
A 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 packed with new hires. Bacon says he’s most interested in making electric car chargers to fight climate change and Space Forge’s potential to exorcise every polluting industry on the planet.
But O’Connor is here because Space Forge has attracted interest from NATO’s €1 billion ($1 billion) 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 like radar.
“The distance that radar can cover (which translates to what it can see and how quickly it can do so) can be dramatically improved by using these materials,” says O’Connor, explaining why Space Forge was among the first six NIF investments to be made public.
In addition to Space Forge, the year-old NIF’s investments include battlefield robots, a company that makes 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 actually never manufactured semiconductor material in space. The only time the company attempted to launch its satellites, the Virgin Orbit rocket carrying them failed 177 km above Earth before crashing into the ocean. O’Connor, one of the fund’s three partners, is optimistic that there is no guarantee the investments will work out. “We have been given the mandate to take this risk,” he says.