Icarus Robotics raises $6.1M to build free-flying maintenance robots for the ISS and commercial space stations

possible. It sounds very sci-fi. I would like to I would like that. Speaking of sci-fi, we have the founders of Icarus Robotics. Let's bring them in from the reream rating room in TV. Welcome to the stream. What's going on guys? How are you guys doing? Welcome to the show. Hey guys, how are you? We're good.

Hey, how's it going? G kick us off with an introduction. Who are you? What are you doing? I'm Ethan Roas, co-founder, CEO of Acres Robotics and we're building the labor force for space. Okay. We're lucky enough to be partner with NASA.

We're lucky enough to be partnered with some of the commercial space stations and be sending robots to space. Sorry, I was talking over here. You said you're partnered with NASA. Is that correct? Let's go. We're lucky enough to be working with some of the most amazing teams over there. That's amazing. Incredible.

Uh what what do you want to do in space? Because I I labor in space. There's so many different things. Repair solar panel, plug a hole after an asteroid smashed into the side of my spaceship. like what what are the tractable problems that you need labor for in space? Let Jamie jump into that. He's the labor guy. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, look, we always say um half of the world's GDP is labor. And I think it's going to be a similar makeup in space. So, uh one of the big things we realize is that essentially we're hyper reliant on astronaut time uh when we're in space. And you know, an hour of astronaut time costs $135,000 an hour.

what these people are doing. They have PhDs, you know, they're amazingly skilled. They've all been, you know, Air Force pilots, all this kind of stuff, but ultimately what they end up doing is the logistics and the maintenance that keeps a lot of these habitats and platforms alive.

So, what we're actually doing is building these dextrous mobile robots, these freef flying drones with uh robotic arms that can essentially uh go and be controlled from the ground and do a lot of the work uh the boring and uh yeah, maybe tedious work that the astronauts don't want to do so that they can focus on the revenue generating stuff.

So that's the experimentation and the science and the manufacturing. That's cool. It's it's it's funny to think about astronauts being like, uh, yeah, I'm worried about losing my job to Icarus Robotics. And they're like, you guys are like, no, it's fine.

You're going to be free, your time is going to be freed up to do higher leverage things. They're like, but I bill at $135,000 an hour. That's my rate. And uh, I don't want to see any wage compression. I'd like a raise next year. Inflation's going up. I want to be at 140 pounds.

You know, they unfortunately I don't think that astronauts are taking home 135 an hour. Otherwise, otherwise the average, you know, Z kid would be like, I want to be an astronaut. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'm not doing thing. I'm going astronaut all the way. Uh so, uh what does testing look like?

I remember seeing all these videos of astronauts in pools. Can you test in water? Is that useful at all? Yeah. And you guys just raised 6 million. I'm assuming you don't have hardware in space yet, but this round will help you get there. Yeah. So, that's great.

We're um we're actually on launch coming up uh by the end of 26, early 27 to the ISS. So, this is full scale testing. We'll be up there for a year. Right now, we have an entire week of crew time to test. But you're 100% correct. Testing on Earth is really, really tough. And the way that you do that is a few modes.

you know, one, you can set up an air bearing facility, which gives you kind of like a frictionless environment. So, think about this like a a really scientific air hockey puck where, you know, the way that there's a thin film of air between the air hockey puck and the actual table.

Well, we do that with nitrogen, high high compressed nitrogen and these things called air bearing. And that gives us really great movement in an XY plane. But you're entirely right. We were just down in Johnson checking out the neutral buoyancy pool, which I think is one of the largest pools in the country.

And you can test there as well. But the most exciting test before you get to the ISS is actually the parabolic flight. So you might have seen those videos of people on the planes. Oh yeah. And these planes go up and down in parabas and they go at the same speed of gravity downwards and that gives you freef fall.

And people misconrue space in orbit. And that zerog feeling you actually get is actually freef fall. And so we'll be doing one of those in the new year which will be super exciting.

So your uh your robots, will they be primarily like inside the International Space Station that dial then go outside or are they multi-purpose? How do you think about the kind of uh two use cases? And are they even that different at all if you're a robot? Yeah.

So uh our plan is initially to start off by uh having these robots do essentially what we call IVA operation. So that's inside the vehicle. So our robot is designed uh basically to be propelled by fans and some other sort of like neat pul mechanisms that we'll uh maybe show a little bit later.

But yeah, so ultimately what we wanted to do is deploy here first because it's actually an amazing place where you have the kind of guardrails of having humans in the loop. Uh you have humans around it so that if anything goes really really wrong, you know, it's not just going to flow out into the middle of nowhere.

Someone can recover it. So, uh, that's kind of the big reason why we went, uh, you know, to go to the IVA, uh, first because most people are looking over this. Really, that's amazing. Uh, well, thank you so much for stopping by the show. We will talk to you later. Congratulations. Let us know.

Let us know if there's We have a pretty harsh environment here in the Ultra Dome. If you need some some testing, just let us know. Final fundrais 6. 1 million. Yeah. 6. 1. Boom. Nice work, guys. Love it. Love it. Congratulations. Congrats on the race. We'll talk. We'll uh we'll see you at the series A. Cheers.

Innocent bystander says Tim Cook could secure his legacy with one move. Can you guess what it is, Jordan? A home printer that works. Home printer that works. Home printer that works. Simple stuff. Crazy. Do you think Brother printer prints like 5 billion USD a year? I found a paper company.

This is uh deeply ironic because we are of course uh partnered with ramp. com. Save time and money. Get rid of your paper receipts. That's right. But I found a paper company that's worth the same amount in market cap as RAMP. Not for long. Not for long. We're going to take them down.

You're going to hear some really negative investigative journalism from short reports about this paper company. It's funny. So Julie Julie Chang in this reply says they're called brother laser printers. Yes, we love a brother. We we run brother laser printers. technology brothers run on brother.

Do you think that Apple's never done the home printer because of environmental concerns around like don't print, don't waste paper? This was always obviously not the future.

Also, I feel like this is one of those things where if I look way back over the c over the past like 40 years of Apple history, I bet they did a printer at one point. Remember they did didn't Apple do a camera like a handheld digital camera at one point that was its own device?

So, Apple's Apple's dip their toes in here and there, but I would love I would love a proper home printer from app from Apple. Oh, wait. So, uh according to Gemini, while it may seem surprising to many today, Apple was once a significant player in the computer printer market. What?

For nearly two decades, the company designed and sold a range of printers from early dot matrix models to groundbreaking laser printers that played a pivotal role in the desktop publishing revolution. They started in the late 70s with the Apple silent type, a thermal printer.

However, it was the Image Writer series produced in the early 1980s that became a popular companion to the Apple 2 and then they got out of the business. Yeah, you can find these on eBay. Apple Writer 2 printer. It probably works fine. What's wrong? It looks Tim Cook should come out with a statement.

Hey, they're out there. Wow. You want it so much? If it's not just uh stated preference, if it's revealed preference, go get yourself an Apple printer. I guess it exists. Um, in other news, uh UFC is happening on the south lawn of the White House and they uh they took a page out of our set design. I see an Ultra Dome.

It's time to trust. It's time to trust their trust up their trust. Don't go trust trust for trust with the White House. No, no, you do not want to go trust for trust with them. They got to they got to get Is this a real photo or is this CGI or something? Like what's going on here? Artist render. It's CG.

I was looking at it for a while. CGI, right? Because like I was scoping out their trust. This has not happened yet. But are you guys kidding? This is like the most obviously CGI image I've ever seen in my life. I can't tell anymore. I don't even You think they just set up a bunch of the the 10,000 people? I don't know.

I I'm not a political person. I don't follow politics that closely. So, I don't know. This might have happened. I'm also, it's double bad because I'm not into politics and I'm also not into sports. So, you could have