Meet the 20-something Brooklyn whiz kids building robots NASA will send to space next year
At the Brooklyn Navy Yard, two young entrepreneurs are developing first-of-their-kind robotics for NASA that may shape our ability to colonize the moon, Mars and the universe beyond. Jamie Palmer, 26, and Ethan Barajas, 23, launched Icarus Robotics in 2024 out of Newlab — an 84,000-square-foot innovation center and hardware workspace within the Navy Yard.The 11-person company is building robots that will take over the manual labor and menial tasks astronauts spend so many of their waking hours preoccupied with.In the first months of 2027, Icarus plans to hand off their robot, Joy, to NASA.
By spring, Joy will be hurtling some 17,000 miles-per-hour aboard a cargo-ship destined for the International Space Station (ISS), where she’ll spend the next 12 or so months performing the routine maintenance work and checks typically left to astronauts.“These guys cost millions of dollars to train, they’re Air Force and military test pilots — some of the most badass people ever — and they’re taking out trash, doing seal inspections and moving bags like they’re in an Amazon warehouse,” Barajas said.“We’re going to automate all of this stuff.”The ISS was launched in 1998, and it’s always been the job of humans to maintain it — at great expense.
In 2021, NASA estimated that it costs $133,000 per hour to support each of the astronauts aboard the satellite, and manual labor is far from the best use of their time.Because cells and fluids behave differently in the ISS’s micro-gravitational environment than they do on Earth, astronaut-scientists in orbit can study them from an entirely new vantage point.In the last few decades, research aboard the ship has led to the development of next generation cancer drugs and protein-crystallization.Take Keytruda, for example.
It’s one of the most effective medications used to treat cancer in the lungs, breasts and skin, and experiments in space allowed scientists on Earth to develop new, faster-to-administer fo...