How Icarus Robotics secured NASA deployment in their first year | Ethan Barajas - BUILDERS

Ethan Barajas' Journey: From NASA Intern to Icarus Robotics CEO Now more than ever, distribution matters. Even if you're an academic and you're not working on anything that's a product, if you don't have the distribution where people are publishing hundreds if not thousands of papers a day and there's not eyes going to your work, no one will build on it. Speaker 2 Welcome back to another episode of Builders. As always, the show is brought to you by front lines dot IO, Silicon Valley's leading B2B podcast production studio. If you're bringing technology to market and want to learn from your peers, we have a library of more than 1200 interviews with venture backed founders and marketers where they talk all things go to market. Of course, if you want to launch your own podcast, we offer podcasts as a service to more than 80 tech startups. The idea? Speaker 3 There is very simple. Speaker 2 You show up and host and we do everything else. Now, with all that said, let's jump in today's episode. Speaker 4 Today, our guest is Ethan Barahas, cofounder and CEO of Icarus Robotics. Ethan, welcome to the show. Speaker 1 Thank you so much for having me, Brett. Excited to be here. Speaker 3 Or so robotics in space. You couldn't come up with anything more ambitious. Speaker 1 No, no, no, definitely not. I was so lucky to get into this like a super young age. Like my first internship, my true internship in engineering was like NASA autonomous growth of plants for the space station and being able to work on that and like see real Space Flight hardware that gets sent to a space station and what it takes to send something to the space station. That was pretty addicting, especially as a young student. And, you know, it took off from there. And a lot of the same themes that I saw when I was in that ecosystem were the same themes kept popping up over and over again. When I was in university, I was lucky enough to study mechanical engineering over at Caltech. Then Caltech runs NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab. And so you get exposure to these professors that are all researching lunar Rovers and Martian Rovers. And so that's really where the bug got me. Speaker 3 And what was your thinking there? When you're at NASA, are you thinking, OK, I'm going to go and have a career here and stick around, or were you thinking, where's the opportunity? I want to come up with an idea to go build something in this space. Speaker 1 Yeah, I mean, well, actually the internship, I spent time working on it as a spin out and that's when I learned a lot about entrepreneurship and the commercial side of the space industry. But I was so young, I wanted to diversify. So when I went into university, I actually refounded like our formula student. It's like a baby version of Formula One where a bunch of college and they got one car and then they erase them at the end of the year with the Society of Automotive Engineers. So I wanted to get my hands into that and I wanted to get my hands into biological and medical engineering because it's like I really wanted to follow my dad, who was a combat medic in the military and a doctor and following his footsteps and really help people. You know, his motto When he deployed to Iraq, he wrote on his boots so others may live. And that was something that became not my family's motto. And it's much easier for my older brothers. You know, one went to go be Kenny and get his pH D in that and save the world. The other one followed footsteps and you know, went to like pre Med school and all that sort of stuff and I was like, I like space and like building stuff. Like how does that tie in? And you know what we do at Icarus to actually get into it and kind of give you to the high level. Astronaut time is one of the most expensive labor forces on Earth, or I guess outside of Earth. It's about $130,000 an hour. And a huge chunk of their day doesn't even go to science. It goes to routine maintenance and logistics where they're moving cargo bags and cleaning things, stuff that doesn't require all the years of experience in training and PhD that they typically have. We're at this period where you can actually make things that have a massive impact in the ISS for Earth. So a great example is Keytruda. It's a cancer therapeutic. We started research around 2019 around when I was working in the ISS where protein crystallization occurs differently in zero tree than it does on Earth. And we realized there's these special mechanisms that allow these proteins to crystallize in a way that treat cancer better. And that drug Keytruda, that direct result of that research we did in space is the number one cancer therapeutic on Earth today. Made $25 billion of revenue just between, you know, 23 and 24, just that, that one fiscal year and save millions of lives. And so enabling things like that, this, you know how I fit that motto. And to wrap up, what we do at Acres in a really tight bow is we're building the robotic workforce for space stations as we move from the ISS to commercial station to take care of all those menial basic tasks. So the astronauts there aren't doing the housekeeping, they're not doing that maintenance, they're not doing that logistics, and they're making those breakthroughs that can only be done with a cube. And we're lucky to partner with ASA and Voyager for our first deployment to the International Space Station in 2027 for an entire year. The Shift to Commercial Space: Why NASA Trusts Icarus Robotics How are you feeling about that? 2027 is not far away. Speaker 1 Oh man, excited, nervous, all the feelings, you know, our company's a very young company, you know, just over a year old now. And so to go from kind of true idea and niche and the whole customer discovery process and the hundreds if not thousands of calls that go into that visitor business model, here is their true use case. You know, then getting ink onto paper of an orbital deployment and working with someone that's building the next generation of space station that will take over from NASA, as well as the people that you idolized as a kid working for as peers. It's a big step and moves really quick, but we've been lucky enough to work with some amazing engineers, build an amazing team and have some amazing backers that believe in us as much as we believe in the mission. Speaker 3 How do you do you think you've got them to believe in you? What you're saying? It must be pretty bold claims and capabilities in the problem that you're solving. Why do you think they've trusted you and put their trust in you? Speaker 1 I think there's a few things. I think a lot of it is timing. You have this big switch from a government backed International Space Station where that $130,000 an hour is footed by NASA and at the turn of this decade now that's footed by commercial company. These commercial space stations are launching, you know, next year, in 2027 and the year after another company may have vast you have Axiom, Orbital Reef, if star Lab, there's a few that are taking place and they have to foot that bill. So that's a really big help on the commercial. Why if you kind of propose this in the past, people would laugh at you and say hey, NASA's got the bill on that one. Then I think the other big thing has been the advancement in robotics terrestrial. When people look at NASA in the space industry in general, you imagine it's this cutting edge, like this is where all of the most bleeding edge technology goes. But under the hood, it's a bit sad. There's an idea of this thing called flight heritage where at NASA there's this database where every single nut bolt washer system that's ever flown to space is there. And if it's there, you use it. And some of the robotics that are critical, cutting edge and still in operation, like their main chips and the boards that they run off, stop production in the early 2000s, stop production. And so if you think about like even a smartphone and what your phone can do now versus what it could have done in the early 2000s and the advancements we've made in robotics, that's a really amazing and exciting time. And that pivot from NASA backed to commercial back allows us to leverage these new technologies and put them into space. And I think the very last thing is just the amount of people that we've talked to and the amount of support that we've gotten for key folks to the point where we've had conversations with some of these commercial stations to say, hey, actually if we change, you know, this hatch closeout to have tabs that are, you know, 2cm larger and be easier for a robot to actually change. Or if we put a fiducial here, the robot can localize itself. So now we're working with them in a collaborative sense to design for a robotic architecture rather than purely a human 1. And so all of these things together come to really give us some legs to run on. And I think the very last thing that I'll point to, and something that I learned making the transition from like pure engineering to building a company now is the way that you connect with people in the way that you tell the story. You know, half of the entire Earth's GDP is labor, people doing things. And if we look at the space industry, there's been 700 astronauts in all of history. There's just about 100. We're active right now. Then out of those, you know, 100, we say we're going to put data centers in space and stations and massive constellation. Well, it's really hard to train astronauts. It takes years and millions of dollars. And then what are we going to do with them? We're going to use a space shuttle and tether them and have them go dock to the Hubble telescope and float out there with a wrench and fix it. It's not the most scalable thing in the world. And so when you paint it in this very obvious picture with the tailwinds from the entire industry, it gets really exciting for everyone involved, and it becomes very clear that robots have to be on orbit. Not removing humans, but making humans most effective at what they're doing, which is the breakthrough is the true science, the things that robots can't do. Speaker 3 I mean, I haven't thought about that, but it makes sense that there's just going to be a lot more astronauts in the future, I would guess right then we currently have. I think it's every boy's dream to be an astronaut. But it sounds like with all this stuff that's going to be happening, is your prediction that there's going to be just way more astronauts, or would there be less because of the robots and they're not as necessary? Speaker 1 Way more astronauts. I mean, as access to space gets easier, as the cost to get this space gets easier, as the infrastructure builds, as we go to the expanses of going to the moon and going to Mars, all that trickles down into Leo, right? We've had an astronaut going around the Earth continuously for longer than I've been alive. That's crazy to think about. There's been someone in space continuously for longer than my entire lifetime, and now it's never been easier to support them and launch more. And then when you take away all the things that make it really hard to be an astronaut, now we can have more. And that's the dream of what we're doing here to Chris, is, you know, there's some things you need a human for. Like, we want humans to be doing these things. There's other things that are just work, like if no one had to do their laundry. And This is why humanoid robotics companies focus on it. If no one had to do that, you know, what can you do with that extra hour in your day? You can spend it with your family. Your life becomes just that much easier. And so in space that decreases costs and makes life that much easier. And you start to see space tourism take off already. You look at something like Blue Origin with New Shepherd and you know, we have commercial just normal people going up and as astronauts on suborbital flights and it's never been easier. They're not doing, you know, the two year training program to go to the ISS. They're going as visitors. Obviously they're doing a training programs or everything that could go right wrong, but it's much easier and that trend will continue and continue. Speaker 3 How many years until you go to space personally do you think if you had? Speaker 1 To, I think the closest I'll get is the parabolic flight that we're planning for a test. That'll be the closest we'll go on a plane. You'll get about, you know, 30 parabolas of 20 seconds of piece of 0G. And I think that's it for me. I don't know. I don't think I'm cut out for it. Teleoperation, Autonomy, and the Future of Commercial Space Stations Hey guys, Brett here. I want to take a few seconds to tell you a bit more about what we do at the front lines. Now, we don't just produce our own podcast. We offer podcasting as a service to more than 80 different tech companies. Now here's one of our own clients, Nicole, in her own words. Speaker 5 The Front Lines came up with the idea to have us interview our ICP for a podcast. They find the guests, get me prepped for the interview, then handle all the post production and distribution. Speaker 4 Now, there's obviously a ton of podcasts. Speaker 2 Out there, but our. Speaker 4 Strategy and our end goal here of this is. Speaker 2 Very specific. Speaker 4 These are not just fluffy thought leadership programs, these are programs designed to generate revenue. Every guest that we bring on matches your ICP and we get you in the room. And then from there you have a wedge to go out and build and nurture an authentic relationship until they eventually become a customer. Let's go back to Nicole to talk about how things went for her. Speaker 5 We launched our podcast with front lines 18 months ago and so far I've closed over 600,000 K and net new ARR nearly a 10 times return. They got me in the room with the ICP and good things happen from there and that's why we're doubling down in 2026. Speaker 2 This is what our podcast. Speaker 4 Playbook is all about we get you in the room, and that room can be virtual. It can be at conferences where we'll send a video crew, or it can be in person at our studios in San Francisco and Palo Alto. If you want to launch a podcast, just visit Frontlines. Speaker 2 Dot IO slash podcast as a service. Speaker 4 And as a loyal listener, just mention that you listen and love the show and we'll give you a 10% discount now. Speaker 2 Back to the episode. Speaker 3 And what does this world look like? I haven't been following that too closely. So with all these commercial space stations that are coming, what is this going to look like 5 to 10 years from now? Is space just going to be covered in these? Speaker 1 I don't think it'll be covered. I think it'll be very similar to what the ISS is now, especially in the timeline where you bound it within the next 5 to 10 years. I think if you extend that out 4050, then the answer changes. But you know within the next decade we'll see these few stations grow and go from single module to multi module and they'll have the same capabilities of the ISS or even more capabilities and even more astronauts. But it won't be this like, you know, 10,000 X and where we're sending starships full of 40,000 people the space, and it won't be like that, but we'll definitely see a big boom. The number of folks that the number of people actually working in space. But there's so much to figure out on the human side of spaceflight. You know, astronauts, they're really well trained. But the unfortunate thing is microgravity, it sucks for the human body. It's a hazardous environment to the point where, you know, your heart tissue changes, your bone structure changes permanently, You get these weird formations and osteoporosis. The ocular pressure in your eyes starts to degrade and gets all wonky. It's a really, really tough environment. And that's why whenever you see astronauts come back down to Earth, there's that adjustment period where they're carried off on the stretchers. It's really bad for your body to be in microgravity. And so, you know, there's people that talk about, you know, gravity simulated stations where they spin like a centrifuge. And if you've ever been on one of those like those fairground rides, like go in a circle and you feel just pinned against the wall, the same thing. But now it's 1G the way you experience Earth. But you know, that's something that we see in sci-fi movies, but something that people are planning for. But right now space is really hazardous. You know, there's only so long it's been there. And until we have, you know, humans spending the time figuring out that biology side and not, you know, moving cargo bags around, that'll be a big barrier for us. Speaker 3 As you were. Speaker 1 Planning out this product? Speaker 3 And this idea was your state of mind that there was effectively like 1 customer. Like, I know other, you know, friendly countries have, you know, their own space initiatives. But for you, was it like NASA or bust basically? Like did you have to get NASA as a customer? Speaker 1 No, I think at first this was the exciting thing and This is why we looked at the industry in general. But we made a lot of bets when we started the company first was, you know, we're going with the Tele operated architecture and we've heard whispers of laser based communications and super low latency, super high bandwidth. You know, right now to talk to the ISS, we use S band radio relays where we go from Earth to a Geo relay 22,000 miles away down to the ISS, back to a Geo relay and back down to Earth. You get about 800 millisecond lanes pretty bad, but with things like Starlink and optical comms, we get about 100 milliseconds. It's probably better than what we're talking to each other right now. And so that allows us to actually operate our robots from Earth space. And the way that you'll see terrestrial robotics companies train autonomy and tasks is they Tele operate the robot. They collect their in distribution data with cameras and video of the actual physics that are happening. And we can train those robots for high level primitives to move cargo bag from node A to node B or carry out a task. And autonomy grows with deployment time. And so, you know, a few months in, we see the Torsten mission and we see that technology come to rise and that was a really big unlock. And then, you know, the commercial stations, we see a few bidding to launch and say, OK, there's now a real commercial use case for us to send these robots. We can get paid for the labor that they're carrying out. But you know, for a venture backed company, what is the scale to where does this go? And you look at the industry as a holistic view and we have, you know, multi thousand agent satellite constellations now. We have people talking about data centers in space. We have people talk about so many of these infrastructure projects that need maintenance, that need robotics to actually change out physical parts. And when you look at what we're doing as a company is we're building from waiver and the corpus of information that'll give us intelligent robotics. And so once you kind of use the ISS as a wedge, we can actually use that intelligence in the robotics to service other parts of the industry and expand out horizontally from there. And so that came from, you know, talking to a lot of different folks and really mapping what it looks like and where the immediate needs and where some of the hair and fire things were. And so at first it was this thing that drew us towards the industry, but definitely not with us here. Marketing Robotics & The Unbounded Future of Space Economy How do? Speaker 4 You think about marketing or do you not think about? Speaker 3 Marketing too much right now? Is it all focused on product? Speaker 1 I think it's such an interesting question because now more than ever, distribution matters. Even if you're an academic and you're not working on anything that's a product, if you don't have the distribution where people are publishing hundreds if not thousands of papers a day and there's not eyes going to your work, no one will build on it. And so I think for us, the biggest thing was first getting validation that, you know, this is a real business, this technology can go somewhere and make a large impact. And then after that, it became execution. You know, can we get these people that say they're interested to actually put pen to paper to actually launch this robot to see if it works, to work with us, to make it work? Is it enough of a priority for them to turn into a large business? And then I think the last thing has been, you know, OK, now that we've validated everything, that could be a spike and we know or as much as you can validate, you'll never validate at everything, right? As much as we can value it for confidence to move forward and know that, you know, the next 1020, thirty years of our life are going to this and this is what our life's work looks like. We then start to look at, well, there's all these other things that we would like to do in the future. We have to get people to know about what we're doing and be excited about it because that's how you get a lot of support. And if you have a lot of support, not only from your customers and your people that you're working with directly, but also the public, things become that much more important. And that's when you see capital injections into the market. That's where you see talent start to get excited. And we kind of saw this in the whole AIML boom of LLMS and LLMS. And you know, like that entire industry of like machine learning and like CNNS and all these sorts of things. It's existed for a long time but around I think. When did GPT? Drop. It was like 2022. Speaker 3 November 22, I think. Speaker 1 Not that long ago. Speaker 3 Yeah, not long ago. Speaker 1 Around when that comes out, the amount of excitement behind it and the amount of attention that I got drew some of the best minds to work on it. And so that's kind of what is exciting about the distribution side of things is getting really intelligent people to work on really hard problems. People want to work on hard problems. So getting that problem out there, letting them know that there's that support and that network work, that's all beneficial to us. Speaker 3 Apart from being on podcast like this, what do you do to? Speaker 4 Really build out that. Speaker 3 Distribution, anything specific that's move the needle and then on the counter side, anything that you tried that didn't work, that you since stopped. Speaker 1 Yeah, definitely done a lot of stuff. It's like everything from, you know, writing little like updates and sending like internal newsletters and things like that. Figure out what works there, what people really resonate with. Do they like getting that, you know, 100th newsletter into their inbox that they've signed up or they're not actually reading it all the way to, you know, traditional media sources where you're giving yourself that reputation and, you know, you're in Forbes or you're on BBC and you're talking with these people. And it's funny, every single one of these things from posting on LinkedIn to posting on Twitter, whatever it might be, they all target different demographics. And seeing the reaction from different demographics has been really interesting. Speaker 3 Final question for you, let's talk about the future so we can go out as far as you want. I feel like you're someone who's thinking big picture here, so maybe let's go out 10 years, 20 years. What's the big picture vision look like here? And what does the world look like in your eyes if everything that you dream about becomes true? Speaker 1 Oh, wow. I like what, you know, if we go out, I think like 10 year timeline, I think you'd really start to see space become, I mean, even sooner you start to see space is like a real economy. It's been growing really, really rapidly over the past couple years. You have some really strong signals of space companies going to IPO. People are talking about the SpaceX IPO, you know, how is SpaceX actually IPO ING at a price 6 times as large or I guess larger than if you Add all of the six big aerospace and defense primes together. And I think that's really exciting. I think like direct to sell in like laser based comms are really exciting. I think the technology that we think about on the day-to-day or that we don't think about on a day-to-day. You have you have things like GPS, you don't think about that from space and that technology changing your life. But that was something that we invested in a long, long time ago that is trickled down to the day-to-day for everybody. And so I think what we'll start to see is we'll start to see a lot more of investment, a lot more of the smart minds working on those problems. And I think the upside is actually unbounded. There's so much that we don't know about what you can do in space. Keytruda is a great example of biologics of what you can do with therapeutics, but then also fiber optics optics, right? If we pull fiber optic cable in space, there's no deformities. There's a much pure crystalline structure. And when you have that pure crystalline structure and you can transmit more data at a faster bandwidth with less energy. And so if we change the undersea cables that we just between North America and Europe, we can decrease the entire energy consumption of the Earth by percentages by 1 to 2% just with that one advancement. And we're seeing the same thing in semiconductors where you have pure semiconductors a super alloys. And I think as we see more and more time go into that industry for sure. And I think the biggest thing also is, you know, we're going back to the moon. You know, there's so much surrounding it geopolitically, politically. But, you know, Artemis 2 is set to launch in, you know, a week here. Not many people know, like for the first time since, you know, the 70s, astronauts are going to be the farthest away from Earth again that they've ever been. And we're going to stay this time not to be tourists. And as we build infrastructure there on that 30 year timeline, the same way that in my life I've had astronauts orbiting the Earth for longer than I've been alive, that's what this next generation will see. They'll see astronauts that have been on the moon every single day for longer than they've been alive. And then the generation after that, it'll be Mars and so on and so forth. Then the amazing thing is for all of these things to occur, robotics will be there supporting every step of the way in every part from low Earth orbit to CISC, lunar space to Martian missions, robotics will be there. And so to be able to move that from what we've seen literally 2000s and only NASA and JAXA and big institutions tackling it to now commercial companies and you know, be some of The Pioneers, there's pretty Dang exciting. Speaker 3 Definitely an exciting vision. Really enjoyed the conversation. Before we wrap, for those who want to follow along with you in this vision, where should we send them? Where should they go? Speaker 1 Yeah, I think you can look us up Acreage Robotics on LinkedIn, Acreage Robotics on Twitter. We're posting some pretty exciting videos right now and then, you know, on socials. You guys should definitely follow us and keep an eye out for some of the demos and the Anthem video that we're dropping in the next week or so here. Speaker 3 Is it? I love it. Thanks again, I appreciate it. Speaker 1 Thanks so much. Speaker 2 Well, that's all for today's episode of Builders, brought to you by. Speaker 4 The Front Lines If you want more amazing content like this, visit Front lines dot IO where you'll find the library of more than 1500 interviews with founders, marketers, and other GTM leaders where we unpack. Speaker 2 The Tactical. Speaker 4 Lessons from their journey and of. Speaker 2 Course, as always. Speaker 4 If you do want to launch your own. Speaker 2 Podcast. We'd love to. Speaker 4 Have a conversation. Speaker 2 With you visit. Speaker 4 Front lines dot IO. Speaker 2 Slash podcast as a service mention. Speaker 4 That you listen, mention you love the show and we'll give you a 10% discount. Thanks for listening, We'll catch you in the next episode.