Startup Besxar booked 12 of these SpaceX booster tests. Sunday's 8 minute sub orbital hop is the first.
Two pods about the size of a microwave oven will spend roughly eight minutes above roughly 100 kilometers on Sunday. Their job is testing whether a reusable rocket booster can double as a sub-orbital vacuum chamber for next-generation chip materials. The booster is the same Falcon 9 first stage that normally drops back to a SpaceX drone ship after helping a Starlink batch reach orbit.
The test is the first in a series of 12 Falcon 9 rideshare flights that Washington, D.C. startup Besxar Space Industries booked with SpaceX in October 2025, according to Spaceflight Now's live coverage of the Starlink 10-50 mission. Liftoff is scheduled for 6:46 a.m. EDT from Cape Canaveral SLC-40, with the U.S. Space Force forecasting 85% favorable weather.
Besxar's "Clipper Class" pods carry samples of semiconductor substrate and precursor material. After stage separation, the first stage will coast to roughly 115 km, above the Kármán Line, the conventional edge of space. The pods will get a few minutes of vacuum and microgravity exposure before returning to the drone ship. That 8 minutes and 19 seconds of sub-orbital coast is the entire experiment.
The bet, in founder and CEO Ashley Pilipiszyn's telling, is that a Falcon 9 first stage is a uniquely fast iteration loop for materials R&D. Ground fabs take weeks between experimental runs. Besxar's model gets one run per launch, at SpaceX's flight cadence, and returns the hardware for analysis on the same drone-ship recovery. The company frames the longer-term pitch as space becoming a "critical extension of America's semiconductor supply chain." That framing is the company's pitch, not a demonstrated result.
The 12-flight booking is a commercial commitment, not a technical one. Besxar announced it nine months before the first hardware flies. The plan puts Besxar in a small club with United Semiconductors LLC, which reserved payload space with commercial space station Starlab in March 2026, and Space Forge, which signed an MoU with United Semiconductors on microgravity chip manufacturing. The competitive frame is real but early: Aerospace America has characterized in-space manufacturing as a market that "doesn't yet exist," while vendor reports like Intel Market Research's size microgravity materials as a forecast category rather than a present-day line item. A 2026 Nature paper on additive nanomanufacturing of electronics in microgravity gives the underlying physics a peer-reviewed foothold.
What to watch on Sunday is whether the two pods come back at all, and what they look like when they do. Besxar's claim of a "first-ever reusable payload program" on a SpaceX rocket is sourced to the company's own press release. SpaceNews has independently reported on the test plan, but a clean recovery is the next thing on the proof schedule, and 11 more Falcon 9 flights are waiting behind it.