The Startup Shaped By Astronauts
They just asked. Space said yes.
Picture this: A person with a PhD and decades of intense training floats through the International Space Station. What groundbreaking experiment awaits? What cosmic mystery will they unravel today?
They're unzipping cargo bags. For hours.
"Every 45 to 60 days, you get around three and a half tons of cargo onboarded onto the ISS," explains Jamie Palmer, co-founder of Icarus Robotics. "And how that's done is you have these amazing researchers, people with PhDs who have all this training, and they're just unzipping bags.”
The real kicker?
"It's actually about $130,000 an hour to keep an astronaut alive in space," says Ethan Barajas, Jamie's co-founder. "That's a yearly salary in one hour."
This revelation became the spark for Icarus Robotics, but the journey from problem to solution revealed something altogether unexpected about the space industry itself.
When Jamie hit the "contact me" button on Star Lab's website, pessimism seemed reasonable. Two university students with Gmail addresses asking to chat with astronauts?
"We're sitting down and we're like, ‘Oh, man, maybe this was a bit premature,’” Ethan recalls about their preparation for the call.
Yet, within days, they weren't just getting a response; they were on a call with the entire C-suite of a commercial space station, including a former astronaut and military pilot.
"We ended up having a great conversation with them and told them the direction of the company, and they gave us probably the best jumpstart we could have ever had building Icarus," Ethan says. "And I think this was maybe one of the very first calls we ever had under the name Icarus."
This wasn't an isolated incident. Throughout their journey, aerospace veterans opened doors, shared insights, and offered guidance that would typically stay locked behind corporate walls.
"All of the information that we've learned from these experts that have made their life’s work, the space industry, they distill down all of those years of research and experience into us in a 45-minute call," Ethan explains.
Operations planners openly shared where astronaut time gets wasted. Industry leaders answered cold emails from students.
Jamie reflects on this unexpected openness: "I think the best thing about the space industry is that everyone has been so helpful. Maybe in other industries they might not have been as welcoming, but in space, everyone has really been fantastic to us."
Why? ‘Coopetition’, a combination of cooperation and competition.
"It's really surprising how open everyone is in the aerospace industry to putting a ladder down," Ethan observes. "Because every development actually helps the industry move forward."
"Everyone cooperates until there's competition," Ethan explains. "But to get to the point of competition, they cooperate."
This isn't just feel-good rhetoric. With the ISS deorbiting in 2030 and commercial stations are launching, the entire industry faces a ticking clock.
"That shift into the commercial SpaceX era, where failure is an option, we can move quickly," Ethan notes. "That sort of progress, people push along much faster because it helps everyone."
In an industry where coopetition creates unusual dynamics, perhaps the biggest bet isn't on the technology or the market. It's on the belief that two young founders who cold-emailed their way through the space industry can solve a problem that costs thousands of hours and millions of dollars each year.