The area compute race is on — and testing’s subsequent large leap is past Earth
The race to design space-enabled semiconductors is shaping out sooner than anyone anticipated. Extra corporations are actually wanting skyward to check their manufacturers of semiconductor applied sciences. Nara Area, the Seoul-based aerospace expertise supplier, reportedly simply received a contract with South Korea’s Ministry of Science and Data and Communication Expertise (ICT) to function its executing company for a mission that includes testing area semiconductors in orbit.
The mission, titled “Improvement and Demonstration of Area Semiconductor Verification Payload and Design of Microsatellite” seeks to confirm the reliability and adaptableness of domestically produced area semiconductors within the area surroundings.
Based on reviews, seven sorts of Korean chips can be launched into orbit aboard a 6U-class microsatellite, the place they are going to stay for an prolonged time period, learning the consequences of radiation, vibrations, and thermal vacuum on the {hardware}.
Knowledge gathered from the experiment will later be used to tell and enhance semiconductor reliability fashions, a crucial step to broaden the usage of semiconductors in satellite tv for pc methods.
“This choice is additional recognition of our technological and operational capabilities, and we are going to proceed to broaden the inspiration in order that semiconductors confirmed by means of in-orbit demonstration can turn out to be core parts within the international market,” stated Lee Jeongkyu, government director of Enterprise at Naraspace.
The mission builds on a pattern that has taken form most visibly over the course of 2025. As new computing paradigms emerged within the type of AI and quantum, tech labs worldwide are exploring ingenious methods to develop economically viable area semiconductors to assist large tech companions construct infrastructure off-Earth.
The push ignited curiosity in microgravity semiconductor manufacturing and space-based testing. International locations with robust scientific and industrial infrastructures have teamed up with universities and analysis our bodies on this budding area of interest to discover the viability of an Earth-to-space provide chain.
In summer time of 2025, UK-based startup Area Forge launched a microwave-sized semiconductor manufacturing unit into orbit — the primary of its variety — aboard a industrial satellite tv for pc. The manufacturing unit, which is now being examined from the corporate’s mission management heart in Cardiff, could make manufacturing in a microgravity surroundings a actuality. Much more mind-boggling, in a latest demonstration, the unmanned mini-factory efficiently generated plasma in orbit, confirming that in-space manufacturing is feasible with out people on board.
“Conserving folks alive in area is dear,” Clayton Swope, deputy director of the Aerospace Safety Mission on the Heart for Strategic & Worldwide Research, stated in an interview with Scientific American.
Commending the idea of unmanned manufacturing in area, Swope added, “If machines can do this work as an alternative, it brings down the price of doing manufacturing in area.”
For the reason that 2000s, the Worldwide Area Station (ISS) has served because the check mattress for advancing R&D works for semiconductors. The College of Florida’s photonic AI chip check, like Area Forge’s trial, builds on that scientific basis.
In a breakthrough, the College launched a mission in October, 2025 to guage the efficiency of photonic AI chips in area. Carried out in collaboration with establishments, like MIT, NASA, AIM Photonics, and Germany’s Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute, researchers deployed a collection of photonic AI {hardware} prototypes to the Worldwide Area Station (ISS) to review their conduct when uncovered to area radiation and atomic oxygen.
Business teams, together with NASA, have lengthy argued that microgravity circumstances in low Earth orbit (LEO) are notably conducive for semiconductor manufacturing. Low gravitational forces, coupled with a sterile surroundings, enable semiconductor crystals to realize the right atomic preparations with decrease defect densities. These circumstances are extraordinarily troublesome to breed on Earth.
As large tech corporations set their sights on extra formidable orbital computing initiatives, there’s a rising perception that the compute efficiency hole opened by AI and HPC may very well be narrowed — if the business is keen to pursue avenues that reach past Earth.
Chatting with the BBC, Libby Jackson, head of Area on the Science Museum, England, stated that though nonetheless in its infancy, the early demonstrations of in-space manufacturing might pave the trail to “an economically viable product, the place issues may be made in area and return to Earth and have use and profit to everyone on Earth.”
