IN Brief:
- £845,000 awarded across three UK in-orbit manufacturing feasibility studies.
- Space Forge targets orbital-grown semiconductor seed crystals for high-power devices.
- OrbiSky will design a microgravity ZBLAN fibre payload to cut loss.
The UK Space Agency has awarded three contracts totalling £845,000 to investigate manufacturing advanced materials in Low Earth Orbit, using microgravity, vacuum, and extreme thermal conditions to produce materials that are difficult or uneconomic to make terrestrially.
For the electronics supply chain, the most direct play is Space Forge’s £300,000 “2Forge2Furious” study, which will explore whether semiconductor seed crystals can be produced commercially in orbit. The agency said the aim is to improve the efficiency, reliability, and power density of high-power electronic devices, naming end markets including telecommunications, data centre infrastructure, EV charging, and quantum computing.
Seed crystals matter because they set the conditions for subsequent crystal growth and wafer production. Improvements here tend to compound downstream, affecting defect density, device performance, and yield. The UK Space Agency has not specified which semiconductor materials are in scope for Space Forge’s study, but the economic logic is consistent: push the hardest part of crystal formation into an environment that is naturally free from buoyancy-driven convection and other terrestrial process noise, then return the material to Earth for more conventional processing.
A second contract, worth £295,000, went to OrbiSky for “SkyYield”, which will design a payload to process ZBLAN fluoride glass in microgravity. ZBLAN is used for specialist optical fibre, and the UK Space Agency said it can transmit light with up to 100 times less signal loss than traditional silica fibre, with potential applications including telecommunications and medical imaging. For network operators, fibre loss translates directly into link budgets, repeater spacing, energy consumption, and total installed cost. If microgravity processing can deliver consistent, scalable performance, it becomes a materials story with immediate infrastructure consequences.
The third contract, £250,000 to BioOrbit for “PHARM”, focuses on drug manufacturing, but it sits under the same programme logic: use microgravity to improve crystal formation and reproducibility, then translate that advantage back into a terrestrial product pipeline.
Space Minister Liz Lloyd said the studies show how space conditions can be leveraged to innovate the development of medicines and advanced materials, while Dr Paul Bate, Chief Executive of the UK Space Agency, said the work is intended to bring “tangible benefits back to Earth — from better medicines to more efficient electronics”.
The investment is jointly funded through the UK Space Agency’s Sustainability & ISAM and Unlocking Space programmes. The immediate output is feasibility and route-to-market work, but the more consequential question sits behind it: whether in-orbit processing can be made repeatable enough, and cheap enough, to behave like a supply chain rather than a science project.
