Elon Musk’s SpaceX to launch reusable “fabships” for orbital chip manufacturing experiments — ‘the ultimate egg drop challenge,’ Besxar’s orbital chipmaking experiments to occur over 12 launches

It’s not quite a chip factory in orbit yet, but that’s the end goal of yet another project to build processors in space. Washington D.C.–based startup Besxar just announced that it has inked a 12-launch deal with SpaceX to test an idea I would have discarded as science-fiction nonsense before: manufacturing semiconductors in the hard vacuum of space.

The company’s prototype manufacturing pods, called “Fabships,” will hitch rides on the boosters of Falcon 9 rockets starting late this year. Each booster…