Icarus raises $6.1M to take on space’s “warehouse work” with embodied-AI robots
Icarus Robotics cofounders Ethan Barajas and Jamie Palmer spent hours interviewing astronauts about what it was like working in space as they homed in on their startup idea. Their big takeaway: the work was often more cargo logistics than cutting-edge science. “We’re Amazon warehouse workers with PhDs,” one astronaut said. If an experiment takes two hours on station, the person continued, the first ninety minutes are spent just moving around cargo and preparing tools. It’s a dismal waste of top talent. “These astronauts that are trained for two years, that come from some of the craziest military backgrounds and some of the smartest, most trained people on Earth, spend 14 days unpacking, repacking those back, just moving them around,” Barajas said. The logistical…
