Space Forge

ForgeStar is a returnable satellite about the size of a microwave oven with a furnace inside it. The furnace strikes a microwave-induced plasma at up to a thousand degrees, the condition needed to grow crystals of wide-bandgap semiconductors such as gallium nitride and silicon carbide out of the gas phase. The return half is Pridwen, a heat shield that folds out like origami to a diameter far larger than the spacecraft, slowing it enough to come home without a conventional capsule.

Joshua Western and Andrew Bacon started the company out of Thales Alenia Space, first in a garage in Bristol and then in a former burger-van factory in Cardiff. The physics they are betting on is real and old: crystals grown on Earth carry defects caused by gravity-driven convection in the melt, and orbit removes the convection. Their commercial twist is hybrid, growing seed crystals in space and processing the wafers on the ground, so only the highest-value step happens up there.

The entire thesis is return, and nothing has been returned. The first satellite was destroyed when Virgin Orbit failed to reach orbit in January 2023. The second, ForgeStar-1, reached orbit in June 2025 and that December did something genuinely unprecedented, firing its furnace and striking plasma at a thousand degrees, the first commercial semiconductor manufacturing tool operated in space. But it was never designed to come home, and it will be deorbited to burn up. Pridwen has been deployed on a parabolic aircraft flight and nowhere else, and as late as June 2026 the company was still raising public money to develop it. The furnace result is also a plasma strike rather than a finished crystal. Seven years and around $50 million in, Space Forge has not returned a gram of material.