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Comment by Squeeze2664 | Hacker News Reader

I'm only YouTube-level informed on how silicon manufacturing works, but something that is, perhaps intentionally, not made clear to someone unfamiliar with the field is that this is not manufacturing chips in space. This is to grow the crystals only, the very first step in silicon chip manufacturing. This is how you get the ingot, then you slice it to get the wafers upon which the chips are built. The reason you would even consider doing it in space in the first place is because, on Earth, gravity and other forces are stronger and result in lower-purity crystals. Basically, what I'm getting at, is that I believe this is pretty much a glorified oven. Moving the entire manufacturing process in space wouldn't make sense, as I don't think the benefits to other steps of the process like CVD would outweigh the insane costs of sending things into orbit.

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Note that growing ingots is an incredible feat at that purity and size that they achieve on earth. It’s already a very very hard step in a crazy process for entire chip manufacturing.

Leaving aside the small issue of getting there, wouldn't it be easier to achieve in space given there is fewer impurities like air floating around?

Even given that the sending finished products back to earth in same clean room conditions for next step seems challenging to make profitable. If it’s a proof of concept, okay, but to take it further the lithography step takes RV sized machines.

In a way that's good because they don't need logistics for the entire supply and production chain up there, they can just drop the (small and presumably valuable) silicon crystals back to Earth.

Silicon ingots used in chip manufacturing aren’t that small: like a ~400mm diameter cylinder a metre or so long, and from memory several hundred kilos.

Looking up their website, it sounds like the company are making only the seed crystal in space, not the entire silicon boule:

"Space Forge is using space-derived crystal seeds to grow ultra-high quality semiconductor substrates on Earth."

https://www.spaceforge.com/

If you've managed to find more details about what process exactly they're implementing I'd be glad to see it - I assumed plasma-based growth, since the BBC article mentions that it's a plasma that is at 1000C here (making heat dissipation less of a problem too), but if they're growing ingots that would usually be done from liquid silicon, which sounds like a mess in space. So are they doing plasma-growth of ingots (which I haven't heard of, but I haven't heard of many things), or are they bringing wafers up and growing ultra-pure layers on top... The website is not super clear on this from what I've seen.

Do gravity-based defects outweigh displacement defects from fast particles?

Also, there are large headwinds from having to ship up a large quantity of raw material and have to deorbit a payload so fragile that any amount of shock is unacceptable. Maybe a high purity silicon boule pays for these headwinds with room for profit on top. I'm skeptical, but time will tell.

It would be pretty easy for them to have done the math in advance and I’m sure they’re aware that space travel is expensive.

I'm sure they've done the maths and determined that it's not economically feasible at all.

But if it works as a proof of concept, in three or four generations time perhaps they'll have a scalable process which pays for itself.

This exactly. At scale there are a lot of things that are profitable that are idiotic when done Ad Hoc. To get to scale though you need a particular kind of bullshitter who can hold on to the idea that what they say is true and also on some level understand that they have to idea how to do the bullshit they're promoting.

>this is not manufacturing chips in space

*crisps

It's from the UK.

Chips are definitely a thing in the UK. Like French fries but usually chunkier: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fish_and_chips

Which is called Fish and Chips in Canada, even though it's served with fries.

I heard some restaurant getting sued for selling "fish and chips" without fish, but I don't remember how it ended

Same in the US

In the Netherlands we have two words for fries and you know if someone is from the north or the south based on their use: Patat, north en Friet, south, particularly in the South people are sensitive to using the wrong, northern word. (And chips are just crisps here.)

What? Every time I see kids on the train they’re talking about going to the appie to buy a redbull and “zakje chips”. I live in Eindhoven though so idk if that plays a roll.

"Zakje chips" is a small bag of crisps (like Lays)... If they go for fries they'd say they go for a "frietje". Eindhoven is distinctly in the South :)

That damn Red Bull though, somehow the kids love it, part of it is probably that their parents keep them away from it. Sugar and Caffeine. Diabetes and poor sleep, great stuff.

In the UK a fish and chips shop is sometimes called a "chip shop". The New York Times helpfully translated this in a recent article:

> “I’ve seen lots of students my age struggling, trying to get work and even the basic necessities,” Agastya Dhar, 17, said. Mr. Dhar has a part-time job in a French fry restaurant, but said even getting that job was tough.

French fry restaurant is now my preferred term for the local chippy. For those outside the UK chip shops normally have no seating, or maybe a couple of uncomfortable, uninviting, flourescent lit plastic benches and tables, normally bolted down, maybe sprayed clean at the end of the night.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/26/world/europe/uk-budget-yo...

The chunkier fries are akin to what the US calls steak fries and are very common in the US as well.

That's gastro pub chips though, not chippy chips.

If you are lucky, you get triple-fried chips. Which are just as good/bad as they sound.

> just as good/bad as they sound.

I.e. extremely good and not at all bad.

healthwise i guess for the bad

Triple-cooked chips are usually parboiled and twice fried; if anything it's probably healthier than a single fry, because the first fry is brief and hot to crisp up the exterior, so the oil absorption's less the second time, and perhaps less overall than a single (necessarily cooler) fry.

The chips in question are deeply brown and shiny, but your reasonable-sounding explanation suits my need for self-delusion so well that I will accept it whether it’s true or not.

What Americans call chips (potato or corn) the UK typically calls crisps.

There is a Douglas Adams inspired The Great British Bake Off subplot out there somewhere.

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