Icarus Robotics cofounders Ethan Barajas and Jamie Palmer spent hours interviewing astronauts about what it was like working in space as they developed their startup idea. Their big takeaway was that the work was often more about cargo logistics than cutting-edge science.
One astronaut described it by saying, “We’re Amazon warehouse workers with PhDs.” If an experiment takes two hours on the station, the person continued, the first ninety minutes are spent just moving around cargo and preparing tools. This represents a dismal waste of top talent. Barajas noted that these astronauts, who are trained for two years and come from exceptional military and academic backgrounds, can spend up to fourteen days just unpacking, repacking, and moving items around.
This logistical burden is tied to regular cargo resupply missions. Approximately every sixty days, roughly three-and-a-half tons of cargo arrive at the International Space Station, and all of it must be unpacked and properly stowed.
Barajas and Palmer, who met at the Entrepreneurs First organization, knew there had to be a better way. Their solution is to use intelligent, dexterous robots to take over these time-consuming chores. However, they are not starting with complex humanoid robots. Instead, Icarus is taking an iterative approach, beginning with a simpler, fan-propelled robot equipped with two arms that have jaw grippers.
To achieve this, Icarus recently raised a $6.1 million seed round led by Soma Capital and Xtal, with participation from Nebular and Massive Tech Ventures.
The design of their first robot is a direct function of the tasks it will perform: unpacking and stowing cargo. Palmer, who provides the robotics expertise, explained that when you move to bimanual manipulation, or the coordinated use of two robotic arms at once, you can achieve around eighty percent of the needed dexterity with simple jaw grippers as you could with a complex human-like hand.
Many of the science experiments astronauts perform on the ISS are also fairly simple in practice, like swapping out cartridges, which is another area where a robotic labor force could be very useful.
The team recently performed a terrestrial long-distance teleoperation demo with a bimanual jaw gripper system. They successfully unzipped a real ISS cargo bag, unpacked it, and zipped it back up again. Palmer stated that this demonstrated you do not need fully human-like hands to achieve meaningful dexterity over a long distance.
Next up is flight testing. Icarus plans to conduct a parabolic-flight campaign in the new year, followed by a one-year demonstration on the ISS via Voyager Space, the operator of the commercial Bishop airlock. The plan is to spend a year de-risking the full suite of cargo bag operations, then progress to finer-grained tasks related to station maintenance, like filter and seal inspections.
The robots will be teleoperated at first. Palmer said the ISS is one of the few work sites where you can justify having someone operating the robot at all times because the labor arbitrage margin is so significant that Icarus can afford a skilled, high-paid robotic operator for a full year.
Icarus’s long-term plan is to build autonomy and general-purpose capability through embodied AI. This mirrors developments in terrestrial general-purpose robotics but is adjusted for the physics of microgravity. The strategy involves collecting data in microgravity with a human in the loop and using that dataset to create the foundational models for on-orbit robotics.
From there, Icarus aims to roll out partial autonomy where a human selects higher-level primitives, which are sets of commands simplified into intelligent instructions like “open the bag” or “unstow the items.”
Ultimately, the goal is to achieve full autonomy for deep space locales where teleoperation is not viable, in order to complement human space activity.
Barajas, who brings space experience from landing his first NASA internship at just 17 years old, emphasized that the goal is not to remove astronauts. He said, “We want to augment them. We want to make the short time that they have on station as profitable and as research heavy as possible.”