Silicon carbide may well be the best known material for the manufacture of high performance optical components. This material offers many advantages over glasses and metals that have historically been used in high performance optical systems. A combination of extremely high specific stiffness (E/r), high thermal conductivity and outstanding dimensional stability make silicon carbide superior overall to beryllium and low-expansion glass ceramics. A major impediment to wide use of silicon carbide in optical systems has been the cost associated with preliminary shaping and final finishing of silicon carbide. Because silicon carbide is an extremely hard and strong material, precision machining can only be done with expensive diamond tooling on very stiff high quality machine tools. Near-net-shape slip casting of silicon carbide can greatly reduce the cost of silicon carbide mirror substrates but this process still requires significant diamond grinding of the cast components. The process described here begins by machining the component from all special type of graphite. This graphite can rapidly be machined with conventional multi-axis CNC machine tools to achieve any level of complexity and lightweighting required. The graphite is then directly converted completely to silicon carbide with very small and very predictable dimensional change. After conversion to silicon carbide the optical surface is coated with very fine grain CVD silicon carbide which is easily polished to extreme smoothness. Details of the fabrication process are described and photos and performance specifications of an eight-inch elliptical demonstration mirror are provided.