A Cardiff-based company that is learning to make advanced semiconductor materials in orbit, where conditions on Earth cannot be copied.
Space Forge describes itself as an advanced materials company producing high-quality semiconductor materials in the space environment. In orbit there is almost no gravity and the vacuum is extremely clean, which the company believes lets crystals grow with fewer flaws than they do on Earth. These materials could be used in electronics, power systems and communications. To do this it builds satellites called ForgeStar, which carry a small furnace into orbit and are designed to come back for reuse. It is also developing Pridwen, its own heat shield for returning from space, and Aether software for tracking and re-entry.
Joshua Western, chief executive, and Andrew Bacon, chief technology officer, founded the company in 2018. They met in 2015 working at a large space company, Thales Alenia Space, and began in a garage in Bristol. Its website says that it wants to bring semiconductor manufacturing into space to improve materials for life on Earth, and its tagline is that the next industrial revolution is not on Earth. Mr Western has described the aim as proving that the right environment for manufacturing in space can be created.
The company's home is Wales. Its headquarters and main manufacturing site are in Cardiff, where in 2022 it opened a 7,500 square foot satellite factory in Rumney that it says is the first of its kind in Wales, with a mission operations centre also in Cardiff. It has a materials development centre in Swansea, at Swansea University's Centre for Integrative Semiconductor Materials. Its first satellite, ForgeStar-0, went up on a Virgin Orbit rocket from Spaceport Cornwall in January 2023, but the rocket failed. ForgeStar-1 launched on a SpaceX rideshare in June 2025 and became the first UK satellite to receive an in-space manufacturing licence from the Civil Aviation Authority. Its furnace was later reported to have reached 1,000 degrees Celsius.
The company says its team designed, built and qualified ForgeStar-1 in-house over more than four years. Its website reports more than 70 staff across Europe and the USA, and emphasises collaboration and long-standing working relationships. Named leaders include Simon Chalkley (Chief Engineer), Andrew Griffiths (Head of Semiconductor Engineering) and Darren Cadman (Head of Semiconductor Business Development). It also has a US arm in Florida and a planned re-entry location in Portugal. These are the company's own claims.
The jobs here cover spacecraft engineering, electronics and software, materials science and semiconductor engineering, clean-room manufacturing, mission operations, business development and regulation. Physics, chemistry, engineering and computing are the natural starting points, but a company that licenses satellites and works with international partners also needs legal, finance and communications people.
Website: www.spaceforge.com
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