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 formulations. As of 2026, the medicine has been used by over three million patients around the world. 

Even freeing up astronauts for just a few more hours per day will be a huge unlock for extraterrestrial research capabilities. When NASA added a fourth astronaut to its ISS crew in 2025, the number of experiments they were able to carry out doubled.

For Barajas, doing work for NASA has always been the mission objective. As a teen, the Maryland-native was enrolled in NASA’s high-school program, HUNCH, at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. He studied extraterrestrial plant growth techniques there before going off to college at Caltech. He later interned in NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab in Southern California.

Palmer had no space experience before co-founding Icarus. A native of Ireland, he worked with Lewis Hamilton and Mercedes’ Formula 1 program as a testing and software engineer before coming to the US on a scholarship and studying robotics at Columbia. At an earlier startup, he deployed autonomous mobile robots in hospitals. 

NASA has previously dabbled with robotics systems like Robonaut and Astrobee, but Joy is different from her predecessors in that she has more dexterity for human-like work and will learn and improve with each new day.

Preparing Joy for launch has been incredibly difficult because the Icarus team could never entirely replicate the space-like conditions she’ll be working in. Most of the robot’s testing took place within the Newlab on a specially constructed table designed to eliminate mechanical friction and mimic the micro-gravitational conditions within the ISS.

For more advanced experimentation, the team brought Joy onto a Falcon 20 aircraft and had the plane dip into free-fall, creating 20 seconds of near weightlessness at a time.

Joy will get to the ISS via a commercial implementation partner — one of the private companies, like SpaceX, which is responsible for sending commercial experiments and hardware into space. She’ll remain in orbit for about a year, with her time divided into weekly blocks with different partners including NASA, NYU and the Naval Research Laboratory. 

Palmer and Barajas estimate she’ll be in use for about six hours per day, including one hour for set-up and one more for breakdown. 

During her first mission, Joy will be controlled by a human teleoperator on Earth. Seated at a large display with 3D-glasses, two robotics arms and footpads, the operator will mime physical movements and Joy will copy them in real time. 

The robot will continuously collect these movements as data points, much in the same way large language models gather data across the internet by scraping text from various sources. In time, the Icarus co-founders say that Joy will become so adept at standard movements like unloading cargo bags or making routine repairs that she’ll be able to act entirely autonomously. On future missions, Joy will build towards more demanding work like repairing components outside the space station, and, hopefully, new construction.

“There’s such a long list of things that we need to do to build persistent lunar or low-Earth orbit habitats — to get humans into space,” Palmer said. “We have big ambitions. Joy is just the start of what we’re building.”