American robotics startup Icarus Robotics has begun preparations to send robots to the International Space Station. This news comes after the company secured $6.1 million in an oversubscribed seed round two months ago.
Icarus announced Monday that it has tapped Voyager Technologies on a new mission management contract to demonstrate its free-flying robotic platform, Joyride, on the space station.
The startup is targeting 2027 as the year the robots will fly to the government station. Jimmy Palmer, co-founder of Icarus, specifically noted, “The robots we’re building this year will fly on the International Space Station next year and work alongside astronauts, doing things that take up all their time.”
More alien robots, more humans
The Joyride flight with Voyager, scheduled for early 2027, will test how well the robots can operate in a live space station environment, according to Advertisement. It will particularly focus on manoeuvrability, autonomous navigation and operational performance.
Voyager will coordinate the robot’s launch, safety approvals and other operational needs under the contract agreement.
News of the mission management contract comes after Icarus raised $6.1 million in a seed round last September. The round was funded by Soma Capital and Xtal, among others, with a focus on building robots that handle the full range of space work.
“I think space is the most exciting place for robots to be,” Palmer said He saidExplaining that robots can go out into space, to places where humans cannot stay, and build infrastructure that allows humans to live there. “(…) The more robots we have in space, the more humans there will be in space.”
Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk shares a similar idea and also wants to send Optimus to Mars.
Elon Musk plans to send an Optimus robot to Mars
Last year, Musk said there was a chance that Tesla’s Optimus Explorer robots would fly on board the spacecraft to Mars on a mission scheduled to take place by the end of this year. However, he stated that there were a lot of things that had to go right for Optimus to be able to fly that mission.
“If these landings go well, human landing could begin as soon as 2029, although 2031 is more likely,” Musk wrote in March.
We hope that the spacecraft will depart for Mars at the end of next year with Optimus Explorer robots! https://t.co/8dzlxzFg0h
– Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 10, 2025
SpaceX’s chief engineer has repeatedly touted Optimus’ use in space. He said in February that Optimus would be the first von Neumann machine that could build civilization by itself on any habitable planet. Even repeating itself Using raw materials from space.
