WHEN WE COVERED moon logistics in 2024, the materials science company Metalysis had contracts to figure out how to turn moon dust into oxygen and metal powder. The vision was 3D printing as a building material. In 2026, the question is no longer whether the process works. It’s what to build with it.

And if in-space manufacturing has arrived, it has its sights set on the electronics industry. The circuit board in your phone is only as good as the silicon it’s built on. And for decades, that silicon has been grown the same way, in carefully controlled furnaces, with the unavoidable force of gravity always at play.

When crystals grow in a terrestrial furnace, heat causes lighter fluid to rise and denser fluid to sink. This convection introduces impurities and inconsistencies into the crystal structure that engineers have spent generations trying to work around. But what if you simply removed gravity from the equation?

That’s the bet Space Forge is making. In June 2025, they launched ForgeStar-1, the first British-built commercial satellite dedicated to in-space manufacturing, aboard a SpaceX rocket. By December of that year, it had successfully generated plasma in orbit, where microgravity prevents convection. The crystal growth was uniform, resulting in larger, purer, and more consistent crystals. This confirmed what micro-gravity researchers have documented since the 1970s, but achieved it here for the first time on an autonomous commercial platform.

The materials in question are gallium nitride, silicon carbide, aluminium nitride and diamond. They are wide-bandgap semiconductors that sit at the heart of power electronics, resulting in faster switching, lower energy loss, and smaller components. According to Space Forge, improving the quality of these materials could reduce energy consumption in electronic devices by up to 60 per cent.

Space Forge is asking what happens when we remove gravity. Metalysis is asking what happens when you remove the supply chain entirely. In collaboration with the Danish Technological Institute and backed by ESA, Metalysis has now processed actual lunar regolith using molten salt electrolysis. They passed a current through Moon dust heated to nearly 1,000°C, stripping out the oxygen, and leaving behind metallic powders. Results from real regolith, rather than simulant, show that subsequent heat treatment yields a consistent alloy microstructure.

The next step is more ambitious still. “The primary innovation of the project is converting the conductive part of lunar soil into a digitally printable material,” says Christian Dalsgaard, Senior Consultant at the Danish Technological Institute. “This opens completely new opportunities for off-earth manufacturing of electronics for future space missions.” The first target application is an antenna manufactured entirely from regolith.

“We produce conductive inks and powder and test that it can be used to additively manufacture a piece of conductive wire,” says Andreas Weje Larsen, 3D printing specialist at the Danish Technological Institute. “By doing this, we demonstrate that the conductive powder can be used to manufacture antennas directly on the Moon.”

Think of what that means for the PCB. On Earth, a board is the endpoint of a vast global supply chain that includes mined ore, refined metal, fabricated substrates, and shipped components. These two projects, with two very different gravitational environments, have one underlying idea: that the assumptions baked into how we make electronics, about where we are, what’s available, and what forces are acting, are not laws of nature. They’re engineering constraints. And engineers are starting to route around them.