Space Forge Limited

Space Forge Limited is a UK company headquartered in Cardiff, Wales, founded in 2018 by CEO Joshua Western and CTO Andrew Bacon, a former Thales Alenia Space engineer. The company builds reusable in-space manufacturing platforms designed to grow high-value semiconductor materials, such as diamond, gallium nitride, and aluminum nitride, in microgravity and then return them to Earth.

Space Forge's core hardware includes the ForgeStar reusable in-space manufacturing platform and Pridwen, a non-ablative, shuttlecock-style deployable reentry heat shield that allows manufactured payloads to survive atmospheric reentry and be recovered rather than destroyed. The company operates from a Cardiff cleanroom facility, with materials R&D support in Swansea, a US subsidiary in Florida, and reentry recovery operations based in Santa Maria, Portugal.

The company's flight heritage includes the ForgeStar-0 mission (launch failure, 2023), a parabolic flight test of the Pridwen heat shield deployment mechanism in May 2025, and the ForgeStar-1 mission, launched in June 2025, which successfully operated its onboard chemical vapor deposition payload ('Lucy') in orbit.