Besxar Hires Diem Salmon as Chief Revenue Officer

Former Anduril executive joins Besxar to lead commercial and public sector growth ahead of first flight with SpaceX.

Washington, D.C. — [02/26/2026] — Besxar, an American semiconductor manufacturing company building off-Earth foundries called “Fabships” for in-space manufacturing, has hired Diem Salmon as Chief Revenue Officer. Salmon is coming on board as the company prepares for the first of 12 missions under its agreement with SpaceX. She reports directly to Founder and CEO Ashley Pilipiszyn and will build the company’s full revenue organization and multi-year strategy across the commercial sector, government, and defense industrial base.

Salmon is a proven builder in national security and advanced technology. She joined Anduril as an early employee and most recently served as Vice President of Strategy and Growth for the Air Dominance and Strike Division, scaling it from early-stage concept to winning several large programs of record, such as the U.S. Air Force’s marquee program, the Collaborative Combat Aircraft. She oversaw growth for three business lines and launched several successful products, including the Barracuda Family of Systems and Lattice for Mission Autonomy.

Prior to Anduril, Salmon served as Budget Director for the Senate Armed Services Committee, working on five annual National Defense Authorization Acts (NDAAs). She is an adjunct senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) and was a Congressionally appointed Commissioner for the Commission on Planning, Programming, Budgeting, and Execution (PPB&E) Reform.

Besxar’s reusable Fabships are designed to produce ultra-high-yield, low-defect compound semiconductors in space – including SiC, GaN, and AlN – the critical materials that power everything from electric vehicles, AI data centers, advanced power systems, and modern defense platforms. Using the microgravity and vacuum environment of space enables material properties that are difficult, and in some cases impossible, to replicate on Earth, while also delivering lower-cost production over time. As global demand for energy and compute accelerates, the real bottleneck is access to high-performance materials that can reliably operate at higher power, higher temperatures, and longer lifetimes. Today, much of that supply chain remains concentrated overseas. Besxar’s flight campaign is the opening step in restoring U.S. semiconductor materials capacity beyond traditional Earth-bound fabs.

“When I joined Anduril, I saw a chance to solve a problem that felt intractable – proving that new companies can bring modern technology to bear for our aging weapon systems and impact our military’s war fighting capabilities for the better. Besxar offers that same kind of opportunity,” said Diem Salmon, CRO of Besxar. “There’s an urgent need in both commercial and public sectors to energize semiconductor production in the U.S. Today, the technologies that define American innovation are not only dependent on foreign adversary suppliers, but constrained by legacy manufacturing methods that were never designed for rapid scale-up and next-gen technologies. Thanks to companies like SpaceX, the economics of spaceflight have fundamentally shifted. For the first time in history, we have this unique window to redefine the entire sector and make space a foundational layer in our supply chain.”

“If you’re building something big and ambitious, you need the right people. We’ve been extremely selective about our founding team for that reason. At the end of the day, we’re here to make space-based semiconductor fabrication a critical part of the global supply chain. That’s the mission, and we hire through the lens of whether someone can make that happen,” said Ashley Pilipiszyn, Founder and CEO of Besxar. “This is a category-creating role, and we needed someone who knows how to commercialize deep tech and take it from prototype to core infrastructure. There aren’t many people who can do that. Diem is one of them."