The two-year-old start-up will test its robot aboard the ISS early next year.

Jamie Palmer makes a simple argument; That demand for space-based innovations cannot be addressed with human labour alone. It’s a “no-brainer”, the 26-year-old says.

Globally, governments spent roughly €119bn into the space industry last year (defence budgets represent a significant portion of these figures), while private investments surged 60pc to €11.7bn, led primarily by US activity. And behind by a large margin – but still at second place – European space ventures raised €1.4bn in private capital in 2025.

Collectively, these investments have created a downstream market valued at around €490bn, largely made up of new-generation satellite communications, and Earth observation and Global Navigation Satellite System-related markets.

This relatively new commercial and scientific battleground – valued at around $1.8trn, according to the World Economic Forum – is propped up with thousands of Earth-based workers and only a handful of highly specialised astronauts, that each cost around $130,000 an hour “to keep alive [in space]”.

But working outside Earth requires this expensive labour to carry out extensive maintenance tasks every day – something NASA once called a “full-time job in itself”.

For example, astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS) need to carry and stow away roughly three and a half tonnes of cargo sent from Earth every 45 to 60 days. Palmer says astronauts he has spoken to say this is one of their biggest time sinks which keeps them from research work.

The Co Tipperary robotics expert and his co-founder Ethan Barajas are responding to this market need with their start-up Icarus Robotics, which has developed a free-flying mobile robot capable of carrying out a mix of tasks. “Essentially, logistics capabilit[ies] in space,” says the Trinity College Dublin and Columbia graduate.

The 2024-founded New York-based company raised $6.1m last year in a round led by Soma Capital and Xtal with the ultimate goal of creating an industrialised low Earth orbit by the end of this decade.

Joy goes to space

Icarus’ flagship robot, called Joy, has two moving arms and uses fans to propel itself through microgravitational environments. The two-year-old start-up will test this model aboard the ISS early next year in its first-ever major partnership with space veteran Voyager Technologies.

As part of the test, one of these robots will be handed over to Voyager around the end of this year, with plans to fly aboard the SpaceX cargo resupply mission in early 2027. Voyager will be overseeing payload integration, safety certification, launch coordination, on-orbit operations planning and real-time mission execution support.

“For [Voyager Technologies] to be able to help us get our first payload to space…is a really, really big win for us,” Palmer says.

In its initial test, Icarus plans to tele-operate its robots inside the ISS. Palmer says that this would ensure safety, prove their thesis and allow them to collect data in microgravity to train their AI.

The start-up wants to make a gradual scale from one human operator per robot, to partial autonomy – with one person looking at multiple robots – to eventually, full autonomy. It says that one astronaut can supervise up to four robots from Earth, reducing costs by around 94pc.

But ultimately, Icarus wants to completely eliminate the need for teleoperation. “Companies can’t justify teleoperation because the margins are so expensive”, the co-founder says. His eventual hope is to have all Icarus robots working in a “hive mind” of sorts.

The start-up took inspiration for Joy from its space robot predecessors such as NASA’s Astrobee, the Airbus-made CIMON and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s INT Ball – developing its highly dexterous robot based on learnings from the older versions.

Infrastructure in space

An industrialised LEO is not complete without scalable infrastructure. “How can we actually put up infrastructure that can be maintained? How can we maintain it? How can we assemble infrastructure that’s bigger than our launch capacity?” Some of these questions are already being answered.

Companies such as Vast, Axiom and Starlab are developing commercial space stations with the hopes of stoking a competitive market in space. Vast’s Haven-1 is set to be the world’s first commercial space station set for launch early next year.

Other solutions, including the re-entry vehicle market is “absolutely huge” right now, Palmer says. Fortune Business Insights values the market at about $12bn this year, projecting it to grow to more than $32bn by 2034.

Meanwhile, orbital data centres are a seeing significant push led primarily by Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which recently filed for a constellation of up to 1m satellites. Jeff Bezos-owned Blue Origin, meanwhile, filed plans for 51,600 data-centre satellites in LEO.

“People are proving out their capabilities, and now they’re starting to sort of commercialise and spread, and I think that’s very exciting,” says Palmer.

The 26-year-old says he had been attempting to build a general purpose robotics company “for the longest time”. He met Barajas at the Entrepreneur First accelerator programme in 2024.

“Ethan’s background is from NASA and Caltech. So he’s been kind of embedded in the space industry. And I had never looked at it before. So ultimately, we came together with sort of my level of general purpose robotics and Ethan’s love in space.”

During his time in Dublin, Palmer briefly worked at Akara, the Time Magazine-featured start-up behind the AI-powered robot Stevie designed to care for elderly people at care homes.

Developing robots for people unfamiliar with such technology gave the young graduate an “experience that not many robotics engineers ever get,” he says.

“Growing up in Tipperary – I always had like big ideas where I knew I wanted to do something like really huge.” Palmer was part of the 2020 cohort of Patch at Dogpatch Labs where he spent time with entrepreneurs ahead in their ideas while also getting to work on his own business.

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