How A Gen Z Startup Got Voyager To Send Its Robot To Space

[00:00:05]Our bet is that space industry is undoubtedly going to be absolutely huge.

[00:00:09]We already have hundreds of billions of infrastructure already up there, and it's only going to exponentially increase. [music] But ultimately, there needs to be a labor force to maintain it. Our bet is that that labor force won't be humans, that that won't scale fast enough to get [music] us there, and that ultimately that labor force will be robotic.

[00:00:26]The space industry is getting crowded.

[00:00:29]Astronaut time is incredibly expensive.

[00:00:32]Any task that we can sort of automate this way would be huge when you consider the fact that astronaut time builds out at around $130,000 an hour.

[00:00:42]Aetheros Robotics, founded by Ethan Burahas and Jamie [music] Palmer in 2024, wants to solve this problem by building a robotic labor force for space. Robots have been used for years and years and years to go explore the cosmos, whether it's the moon, [music] it's Mars, whether it's, you know, things out in other galaxies. And now finally, we're at a point where those robots are here to help us build and help us to unlock the space industry. And [music] that's our goal as a company. When you look at the cost of one of these robots, they are not that high. I mean, they are they are obviously tens of thousands of dollars, uh maybe even $100,000, but the cost of robots will come down.

[00:01:25]So, the economics of the actual usage of the robot is very, very clear. Not only do the founders behind this ambitious undertaking not have traditional aerospace pedigrees, they are surprisingly young. I've been working as a mentor with these guys, and my philosophy towards angel investing is that the only thing you can really invest in as a early-stage angel is people.

[00:01:55]You're looking for exceptional people, and these two really are pretty exceptional. [music] I mean, Ethan is still only 22, and the guy is phenomenal as a CEO, and Jamie is is a great engineer. Ethan Bar-Ziv, Iggy's 22-year-old CEO, [music] was obsessed with dreams of playing Division I soccer. I think my very first word ever was ball. And [music] I have two older brothers, they both played soccer, and it was always something absolutely massive in my life.

[00:02:24]That wasn't until [music] a persistent high school teacher pushed him into an engineering class.

[00:02:29]By age 17, he was interning at NASA, designing [music] agricultural nano labs for the International Space Station. I got to see that, wow, even at a young age, you can impact [music] a massive industry or do something that has insane impact in something [music] that, you know, you dream about as a kid, being an astronaut, working on the International Space Station. That was really the big switch for [music] me. I was lucky enough to be able to choose what university I got to study at, and I got to study mechanical engineering at Caltech, which [music] runs NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab. His 26-year-old co-founder, Jamie Palmer, grew up in Ireland, steeped in motorsports. I used to have like quad bikes and motocross [music] bikes and stuff like this, and I used to actually sketch the cars I saw out of the window as well, and I always used to want to be a car designer before I even knew what like an engineer [music] actually is. So, I think naturally when I started studying mechanical engineering, I don't think I surprised anyone with that.

[00:03:19]>> [music] >> After landing a dream engineering position with Mercedes Formula I, Palmer utilized a year-long hiatus before a start date to immerse himself in the field of robotics.

[00:03:29]>> [music] >> I ended up working at a robotics startup where we were deploying autonomous mobile robots to hospitals to assist frontline [music] workers during the pandemic. So, then I got to see these robots going out into the wild and actually doing some really amazing things. But around this time, this is when I finished that role, it was when I was due to start in F1. So, I actually went to Formula I, >> [music] >> was working with the Mercedes F1 team full-time for just over a year. I missed robotics so much that kind of against all advice, >> [music] >> I ended up leaving Formula One and kind of coming back and actually moving to the US. So, I got a full ride scholarship to do grad [music] school at Columbia. I got to work under really amazing researchers and professors there and it really opened my eyes up to okay, general purpose robotics is really the way to go. The two met at a talent incubator called Entrepreneurs First. Me and Ethan actually met there, but we weren't working together for quite some time. We ended up kind of bonding over a mutual love of motorsport and Formula One >> [music] >> and you know, we would hang out a little bit on the weekends and stuff and then we got towards the tail end of the program and I was trying to build a general purpose robotics company. Ethan had this [music] great background from the space industry and then all of a sudden we kind of realized that okay, there might be something here in the intersection of these two things.

[00:04:35]>> [music] >> We realized this was amazing merging of theses about what the future looks like, [music] whether that's generalizable robotic labor, whether that's unlocking the space industry for Earth and you know, for beyond. And so, it became this massive [music] focal point for us and that was the moment that Icarus was born and we started talking to everyone we could get our hands on to to validate this or invalidate this. And we realized that from the amount of support that we were getting from such a initial very early quick and dirty concept, it would be [music] you know, dumb of us to not attack this problem and not put our best foot forward and build this company.

[00:05:14]Just [music] myself and Ethan, we were able to raise, you know, a $6 million round so short [music] after founding the company. One of the things that originally made me quite cautious about space investment was I had a view that it was going to be probably five, six, seven years before you could get to revenue.

[00:05:34]And so much [music] can change in that period of time that makes the investment very risky.

[00:05:40]But actually, the economics that they were able to demonstrate here with I think they are expecting to get to first revenue by the end of next year. So, that is only what 20 months away now, 21 months away. This is remarkably short now, and which makes it [music] much easier to invest cuz you can see you can see a a sort of path towards revenue with not [music] that many steps along the way.

[00:06:06]When the time came to incorporate, they chose a name that most would consider [music] a warning. Icarus was thrown out, and it was at first just a cool name, Greek mythology, but the more and more we thought about it, we realized that it's actually this really cool story of ambition, and a lot of people think ambition is bad, [music] but it's not actually a negative trait. If you think about anything amazing or world-changing that's been put out into the world, it's because someone was ambitious enough to [music] tackle that project that had never been done before.

[00:06:33]And for us in building this company, it is about [music] taking the most massive bet that we think is our life's work, that we think is going to have a massive impact. And to have that ambition, but also remember from that story to have measured execution in the steps we're taking to [music] get there. And so, it's a nice reminder and and a great story with the name, and some people get up in arms about it, but we like that it's controversial a little bit.

[00:06:59]>> [music] >> When it comes to thinking about startups, particularly startups with young founders, one of the big challenges is credibility with much more mature enterprises. And one of the things that you always think about is doesn't there need to be an adult in the room somewhere? [music] And it has blown me away the way that these two have managed to consistently again and again and again engage with quite substantial organizations and actually hold their own.

[00:07:36]If you throw two engineers in a room together and tell them to build a big business in a vacuum, Uh it'll never happen.

[00:07:43]>> [music] >> And I think it's something we learned very early on and we were lucky enough to have advisors and mentors within that program that can help teach us that very early before we made those mistakes ourselves. There are just so many things that you have to learn super fast, but they they sort of know what they don't know. And that's what will, I think, allow them to get through this journey.

[00:08:05]As a founder, you're always coming across new things [music] and it's having the the humility to realize that sometimes you have to ask for help and not be shy about doing that, which is where they are.

[00:08:17]Because testing in actual space is incredibly [music] expensive and difficult, the duo brought space to New Lab, a Brooklyn-based co-working venue for tech entrepreneurs. It's actually pretty industrial here in the Navy Yard.

[00:08:30]And so you have access to this really awesome ecosystem of companies around that are aerospace machine shops or in [music] the mechanical industry or producing parts that we use. And New Lab actually is a place where, you know, New York incentivizes young companies to come in. They give you, you know, cheap rent, but also they give you access to these [music] facilities for you to do manufacturing where you don't have to spend the high cap X on these machines that allow us to produce parts in-house and rapid [music] prototype very, very quickly. At their New Lab headquarters, the team is tackling one of the most time-consuming [music] chores in space, unpacking cargo bags. They said, "Well, we could demonstrate loading anything, but we think loading a real NASA cargo bag would be the best thing to do." So, next time I spoke to them, they'd got hold of a NASA cargo bag. And then we talked about, "Well, maybe they should really have a an astronaut on their advisory panel." And the next thing I talked to them, they'd got an astronaut.

[00:09:25]So, they just They are just incredible at making stuff happen.

[00:09:34]This table is really interesting. It's one of the test rigs that we have here in our facility, and ultimately, it's what we call an air-bearing facility.

[00:09:41]So, [music] these chassis under here, they hold high-pressure nitrogen. And what they do is they push that through little small air-bearings underneath.

[00:09:48]So, essentially, what's happening is these chassis are floating on the table.

[00:09:52]So, whenever we fire them up and turn them on, we actually get the robot able to move around in sort of 2D microgravity. And similarly, [music] our payloads as well. Instead of waiting years to develop perfect autonomy, Icarus uses embodied AI, >> [music] >> where human pilots control the robots in real time, teaching the machines how to work. You can see our operator in the loop. And this is one of the core parts of our technology that we really care about [music] is actually getting human intelligence behind the wheel to do expert examples of tasks. [music] And why this is important is kind of first, we can actually start to provide value to our kind of customers and stakeholders right away by actually having a remote-controlled robot and not trying to wait some time for actually that autonomy to be built out. [music] What we can also do is we can collect the telemetry and the kind of examples of everything that, for example, Inigo is doing here, and actually use those demonstrations to train the robot to actually do the tasks then on its own.

[00:10:47]So, basically, by having the human essentially show the robot what to do many times for many different types of tasks, over time, we can actually build up the intelligence by actually doing robot learning and [music] developing the capability to be rolled out autonomously.

[00:11:00]Having AI in these robots is really, really important because what AI allows you to do in [music] the context of robots specifically is we can now learn how to do tasks. So, if a task [music] changes or if you have a slightly different perturbation of a task, no longer will your system fail, but your system can actually generalize and carry out many different tasks in [music] space. And we haven't really seen this before in the past. When founders talk too much about AI, uh I tend to tend to switch off cuz it's just like [music] they're It's using a buzzword.

[00:11:31]But for Jamie and Ethan, they've always talked about how the technology works in a very, very grounded and pragmatic way.

[00:11:40]The real test comes in 2027.

[00:11:43]Icarus recently signed a deal with Voyager Technologies to launch a mission dubbed Joyride One to the International Space Station.

[00:11:51]Robotics in in space is sort of an up-and-coming thing. It's it's been around for a long time. We've flown a lot of robotic payloads. We've flown a lot of payloads that utilize an on-orbit asset that the NASA [music] had for years, but they're sort of running into the limits of what they can do as a test vehicle. So, what what interests us about Ethan and Jamie and Icarus is theirs goes beyond that. Theirs goes into something that not only can be used to test, [music] but also can be used uh to actually save astronaut time on orbit. Actually as a vehicle of of service.

[00:12:22]>> [music] >> The main goal of that mission is we're producing this new free-flying architecture of a robot that's free-flying, but also has dexterous manipulation. And we've [music] seen free-flyers that are cameras that track astronauts before, but they don't really do anything useful other [music] than film. And so, by proving this new architecture that can interact [music] in a crude environment with humans there, which is a very big safety [music] step for robots. Um but then also take care of some of the cargo logistics that we're talking about for commercial [music] space station companies and for the ISS. You can only test so much [music] terrestrially when you're trying to work on microgravity technology. It's just everything's different.

[00:13:02]These guys know that. They're all they're on top of it. They've been planning for this for a long time. But, you have to get to true microgravity [music] to be able to test that. They they know their way around it.

[00:13:11]By delegating logistical maintenance to Icarus [music] robots, crew members will be able to reallocate their primary focus towards high-level scientific research. Ultimately, what astronauts [music] end up doing is they're carrying out experiments, they're carrying out you know, manufacturing tasks. [music] Essentially, creating new technologies that are going to be used here terrestrially on Earth. In 2019, this [music] massive study comes out about Keytruda. It's a pharmaceutical drug that has been [music] researched in space. We changed the way we manufacture it on Earth now because of the research that we've done in space, and it's one of the most effective cancer therapeutics on Earth. And that study was coming out just around the time that I'm learning about you can manufacture things in space. You can research pharmaceuticals. [music] You know, people are making semiconductors and new generations of fiber optics. [music] If we can actually remove the things that, you know, take up so much of their time and take those off their plates, [music] we can actually do far more experimental throughput of these essentially, [music] you know, world-changing experiments that they're actually doing up there.

[00:14:12]That always stuck with me is that space isn't just this aspirational thing that we, you know, send [music] astronauts to the moon, like we just did with Artemis, or send them to the ISS. It's something that has real impact [music] on Earth and can be this massive step change for Earth and for all of humanity.

[00:14:29]>> [music] >> There's not a massive amount of infrastructure that exists to support humans in space today, but I think robots are the natural candidate to [music] go actually create that and actually have everything ready for when we want to get there.

[00:14:40]That was really interesting to us as a company that's [music] sort of building our own space station and and looking to automate it to a larger degree and >> [music] >> and leave astronaut time for doing more research and and investigative work.

[00:14:51]You know, if robotics can help out with the I don't want to call them mundane tasks, they're necessary but sometimes mundane tasks, that would be great.

[00:14:59]Despite their youth, Barajas and Palmer are shouldering the immense pressure of building the infrastructure for a multi-billion dollar commercial space economy.

[00:15:07]But for Barajas, >> [music] >> the drive to succeed comes from a deeply personal place.

[00:15:12]My brothers and my family, we all try to live up to this motto, and it's so others may live. And it was what my dad wrote on his combat boots when he deployed, and that motto has been like kind of a North Star for everyone.

[00:15:24]>> [music] >> And there's a lot of different interpretations to what it means and what it means for you know, that person.

[00:15:28][music] But for me, being able to put forward technology that will change an industry and that will unlock a massive amount of new technology for people on Earth [music] is my way of living up to that.

[00:15:42]It's a massive gamble, but Palmer believes risk-taking is necessary in this industry. A conviction that traces back [music] to the origins of the company's name. We always like to think about the story a little bit differently and I think it was Stanley [music] Kubrick or someone said the moral of the story wasn't necessarily that he flew too high. It was just that he should have built better wings.

[00:16:06]>> [music] [music]