- 10 hours ago
Even astronauts do grunt work, including routine maintenance and organizing cargo. It’s a waste of precious space time and taxpayer money—it costs about $130,000 an hour to keep astronauts in orbit. Ethan Barajas’ Icarus Robotics aims to delegate the tedious tasks to robots. Cofounded in 2024 with Jamie Palmer, the New York–based startup is building AI-powered robots to handle the mundane so the highly trained humans “can focus on the groundbreaking discoveries that only astronauts can do,” he says. Barajas interned at NASA at 17 and dropped out of Caltech after three years to build Icarus, which has raised $6.1 million in seed funding. The company is planning a test run of its robots aboard a zero-gravity flight to prepare for a yearlong test onboard the International Space Station in 2027.
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TechTranscript
00:00At every point in my career where I've thought, maybe it might be just a little too much to strive for this.
00:05Maybe it's not for me. It's not true. You can really do anything.
00:17Ethan Barajas, thank you so much for joining me. I'm very excited to chat robots.
00:22It's going to be exciting. I'm excited to chat about it too.
00:24So tell me, what does Icarus actually do? Is the goal to literally put robots in space?
00:31Yeah, inside of space stations. So we want to help out astronauts.
00:36So the ISS is de-orbiting in 2030. And with that, we have this rise of new commercial space stations.
00:43And in these commercial space stations, we're trying to leverage the last 25 years of research and manufacturing on the ISS
00:48and produce really amazing things in the pharmaceutical sector, the semiconductor sector, fiber optics, super alloys.
00:54And a bunch of amazing industries. But the issue is astronauts cost a lot of money.
00:59It's about $130,000 an hour to keep them alive.
01:02And, you know, most of the time these astronauts are spending their time just moving cargo bags around
01:08or doing seal inspections or literally cleaning with a vacuum.
01:12And we want our robots to take care of that so they can focus on the groundbreaking discoveries that only astronauts can.
01:17And more recently, now that there's going to be uncrewed periods on these stations,
01:22actually do some of the science and bring those experiments forward and those discoveries forward.
01:27How did you get the idea for this?
01:30Well, I think it's a joint combination of my background and my co-founder, Jamie Palmer's background.
01:37So I was lucky enough to get my first NASA internship when I was 17.
01:42And I have to shout out one of my teachers, Mr. Gershner, because I didn't really want to go into engineering.
01:50I like building things. And I wanted to play soccer.
01:54Right. Like I worked to like four years varsity soccer, was on the developmental academy for like playing in the National Premier League and Division One soccer.
02:03And then this guy was like, hey, you need a tech credit to graduate.
02:08And it was this teacher. And I was like, sure, I'll take your class.
02:11And he happened to be one of the most amazing mechanical engineers and had this program that led to a NASA internship in your junior and senior years.
02:19And I actually dropped the class.
02:22He tracked me down and told me to take the rest of them.
02:25And it was like a semester late that I rejoined.
02:28And I was lucky enough to get that internship and work on autonomous plant growth for the ISS and go present at the ISS R&D conference and see what it was like to build spaceflight hardware that goes to the International Space Station.
02:42And that's where I was exposed to all these other industries outside of plants.
02:46And what Jamie's background is, he's one of the most amazing roboticists that I've met.
02:49So he graduated from the University of Trinity, Dublin, actually.
02:54He's Irish.
02:54And he used to work for Acara.
02:57It was a startup that during COVID was making those, you know, those autonomous UV disinfection robots that would go around and disinfect environments.
03:05So he worked on that.
03:06And then he built a career in Formula One at Mercedes and won races there with Mercedes.
03:11And then started to come back to Columbia because he realized that his passion was robotics and not making two cars go fast.
03:20And so he got a full ride to Columbia to do dexterous manipulation, did the redesign of one of Time Magazine's best inventions, which was like a dexterous robot hand.
03:28And one day we're sitting in the office together when we're talking about companies and businesses that we want to build and what our life's work could be.
03:35And I'm talking about the benefits of space and how the best cancer therapeutic on Earth that we have is from in-space research and all these different markets that we can unlock and just how hard it is to get astronaut time.
03:47Because I remember fighting for like five minutes of an astronaut's time.
03:51And he just looks at me and we had been friends for a while at this point.
03:54And he's just like, you're the biggest idiot I've ever met.
03:57This is the best argument anyone's ever made for a robotic labor force.
04:02And then that's what really kicked it off.
04:04And after that, we went to interview everyone from astronauts to people on the ISS ops planning team to researchers in universities.
04:13That's an incredible story.
04:15Also, soccer to NASA.
04:17Crazy pivot.
04:19But it's one thing to have the idea, but how do you actually execute on that?
04:23How have you, you know, if I'm correct, you are going to have your first test flight in 2027.
04:28So how did we get to that point?
04:30So it definitely started with talking to a lot of people.
04:34We wanted to know if it was actually a pain point and what this new commercial era of space looks like.
04:41And we have rockets launching almost every single day now, payloads to low Earth orbit.
04:46And with the government moving away from low Earth orbit and going to the moon and Mars, now industry can take place.
04:52So the first thing was to talk to these guys.
04:54Where are they going to actually generate their money?
04:56Do they care about the science?
04:58Do they care about the manufacturing?
04:59And then, like I said, talking to the astronauts.
05:02What do they actually do all day?
05:03What do they spend their time on?
05:05And you find out they spend eight hours sleeping and two hours exercising and then calling home and doing things so they don't go crazy.
05:12And then the little portion of the day that they do have to do work is, you know, housekeeping.
05:18And you really want these astronauts that are trained for bunches of years and come from some of the most insane military backgrounds to do science.
05:25And we realized that not only is there a lot of economic value, but it makes sense and it will be beneficial to people.
05:32And the people that we work with and we're lucky enough to actually launch the ISS with, so NASA, ISS, National Lab, and Voyager, agreed with us and they helped us get there.
05:41And they reduced the barrier of entry and where we have questions of, you know, how does this work and can we actually do this?
05:48They help us solve that.
05:49And that transition from, like, government work to commercial work is really key because what we can do with robotics now is amazing.
05:58And when you work with NASA and at NASA, there's a lot of red tape for better or for worse.
06:04One of the things we talk about all the time is this idea of flight heritage.
06:07So there's this database of things like from nuts, bolts, and washers all the way down to full computers.
06:13And if it's flown to space, it flies again.
06:15And so there's not much forward progress because no one wants to re-qualify something if it's safe.
06:21And we're lucky enough to work with partners that will allow us to push the boundaries of what's ever been sent before.
06:26Okay. Yeah.
06:26I was going to ask, you know, why commercial and why not work with the government?
06:31Yeah.
06:31The government, like, is amazing.
06:34And, you know, NASA was founded.
06:35We're on the moon 11 years later.
06:38But it moves at the speed of government sometimes.
06:40And with these new commercial entities, like, one example is Vast.
06:45Vast is a new commercial space station company.
06:48They were founded in 2020, 2021, I believe.
06:52And their launch to low Earth orbit with their space station is May of next year.
06:58And it's this insane growth curve that you've never seen before that's unlocked this new era of commercial space.
07:04And it's like this new golden era of the Apollo missions where we're moving so fast.
07:10And that idea of NASA being founded and we're on the moon 11 years later, we're seeing that same resurgence and that same excitement about what we can do in space with these commercial entities.
07:19And that's one of the best things that we could ever be a part of.
07:22I'm curious to know what these robots look like visually, if you can describe that for me.
07:27And then what exactly are they doing in space, you know, as someone who might not know much about what's going on up there?
07:35So I think the best way to think about it is imagine a floating drone with bimanual manipulators.
07:42So two arms.
07:44Or even think about it if you know what an underwater ROV looks like.
07:48And so two arms on a floating mobile base.
07:51And what that mobile base allows us to do is actually traverse across the environment.
07:56So rather be attached to a wall and only have one workplace, we can actually move things around from node to node.
08:02And so, like you said, what do these tasks look like, right?
08:05One of the biggest tasks is cargo bag unpacking.
08:09So every about 60 days right now on ISS scheduling, we send about three and a half tons of cargo to this space station.
08:16And this is everything from food, this is everything from oxygen, water, to new experiments in science that we want to do.
08:23And it takes a crew of about four astronauts.
08:26And obviously this has elapsed and all at once.
08:29But from what we found anecdotally, seven days to unpack all of this and then seven days to repack it.
08:35And when we've talked to some astronauts, what they've told us is for us to go do an experiment, the first hour and 30 minutes out of two hours blocked will be us going to those bags to find the things to actually do the experiment.
08:48And the last 30 minutes will be us, you know, doing a new, like, protein crystallization for some therapeutic.
08:54And so we want our robots to take care of all of those basic menial tasks.
08:58And cargo bag logistics is the biggest first one.
09:01You've raised some 6.1 million, correct?
09:04Is that enough to manufacture something like this?
09:08Yeah.
09:09Yeah, it's a great question.
09:10So for us, yes, our first deployment is to the ISS.
09:14The robot's launching and this is amazing.
09:16And we have a couple of really, like, exciting test points coming up.
09:20So we work in our office right now on an air-bearing facility, which, think about it like a more scientific air hockey puck table that gives us frictionless movement in the XY plane.
09:30And this allows us to test some of those dynamics.
09:32And coming up, we have a parabolic flight where a plane goes up and down.
09:37And on the down part of the parabola, you're in free fall.
09:39So you're falling at the same rate of gravity.
09:41And orbit is not actually the same thing as space.
09:44Okay.
09:45If you go to space, you can take a helium balloon and just send something up.
09:49And as soon as you cross the Kármán line, you're technically in space.
09:53Okay.
09:53Orbit is when you're spinning around the Earth really, really fast and gravity is still affecting you, but you're just moving so fast you don't fall down.
10:00And so that's what the International Space Station is.
10:03And that's what that plane represents.
10:05And we get to actually test on Earth without deploying to space.
10:08Okay.
10:08And then the last thing is actually deploying to environment, to the ISS for a full year, where we have one week of crew time to test the robot and then we can extend further.
10:18But the reason why we can do it and be so capital efficient is we're deploying to inside a pressurized volume.
10:28So like you were saying, that's $6.1 million for us.
10:32We're deploying to inside of the space station.
10:35So inside the pressurized volume.
10:37And when people think about space, they think about the vacuum of space, the temperature gradients.
10:43It's 200 degrees to negative 100.
10:45They think about solar radiation pressure.
10:48And we're lucky enough to deploy an environment, number one, with astronauts there to help us fix things when it breaks, because the robot is going to break.
10:55No robot works first time.
10:57But also it's like this room right here, just sans gravity.
11:00And that allows us to use different hardware that's not necessarily rated for the vacuum of space and makes us much more capital efficient.
11:08Because at the end of the day, we're solving a robotics problem.
11:11And it's what are the contact dynamics?
11:13What does the controls?
11:14What are the dynamics of that mobile robot moving things and manipulating things?
11:19What is that like rather than us solving an aerospace problem?
11:23And so that's how we get there much faster.
11:26Gotcha.
11:26At what point do you start generating revenue with this?
11:30So are you already there?
11:31Yeah, yeah.
11:32So right now we're on test programs.
11:34Yeah.
11:34So we're lucky enough to have the barrier of entry decrease for us to actually launch the robot.
11:38It wouldn't be possible with that 6.1 million like you're talking about without the folks that we're working with.
11:45And so after you prove out the technology, you can actually have it operating in these environments.
11:50But that's really the biggest barrier of entry when it comes to space is the technology either works or it doesn't.
11:57And if it hasn't been proven yet and you don't have what's quote unquote called flight heritage, you can't really cross into that step.
12:04And so right now we're in this really unique period where the phase two of the commercial low Earth orbit destination program, that commercial space station program, is actually being put out by NASA and accepting proposals.
12:17And one of the things that happened recently was they switched from this continuously crewed model to only asking for four crew one month at a time.
12:26Okay.
12:26As many months as you want.
12:28And some of the current models have four months out of the year.
12:31But this leaves eight where you're not doing anything.
12:35And now you have this floating billion dollar tin can around the Earth that isn't producing any science, isn't manufacturing anything, and there's no astronauts on board.
12:44And so very recently, just in the last couple of months, the conversation of what does robotic automation on these stations look like has become that much more pressing.
12:53And even on the geopolitical stage, we heard the Senate talking about it recently with, you know, what the Chinese can do on Tiangong and the taikonauts there.
13:02So it's a very interesting period where it's moving very quickly, which is exciting.
13:06So is it like the space race, but for like, robotic?
13:11Yeah.
13:11Yeah.
13:12No, no.
13:12Like, I think I would classify it as that.
13:14I think there's a there's like a big worry about what the moon looks like, what Mars looks like and who's there.
13:20You know, some of the most valuable pieces of real estate are pieces of water, ice and the moon.
13:24But in the in-between, it's, well, what does the next generation of semiconductors look like?
13:30Well, is that in space?
13:31And if it is, we would love to have American industry benefit from it.
13:35What's the next generation of semiconductors?
13:37What's the next generation of fiber optics, pharmaceuticals?
13:41And so that's part of the discourse that's been occurring.
13:44And these robots, they're AI powered, correct?
13:48Yeah.
13:49Obviously.
13:51But what are the other ways?
13:52I'm curious to know that you're using AI on the back end of things, like on the business end or whatever it is.
13:58I want to know a little bit more about that.
14:00So with the robots, it's actually pretty nuanced.
14:03OK.
14:03And so I'd love to take you through it because there's a lot of misconceptions.
14:06People love AI.
14:07Yeah.
14:08I'm like, what does that mean?
14:09Right.
14:09AI powered.
14:10It's this buzzword.
14:10Right.
14:11So it's much more simple.
14:13Right now, with communication to the ISS, we go through S-band radio.
14:18So think about this like a really bad walkie talkie.
14:19So the Earth is here.
14:22We communicate all the way out to a geosatellite out here.
14:25And the ISS is somewhere in between.
14:27And we go to the geosat, to the ISS, ISS back to the geosat, back to Mission Control, Houston.
14:31And this takes about 800 milliseconds to one and a half seconds.
14:36Well, now we have these massive optical communications.
14:40It's like Starlink, for example, where we can just use that constellation that's orbiting the Earth in the station here.
14:47And we can use optical relays to actually have much higher bandwidth and latencies closer to 100 milliseconds.
14:54So what this allows us to do is have a human on the Earth actually pilot these robots in real time.
15:00And this was proven out on the Polaris Dawn mission, where we actually FaceTimed astronauts for the first time.
15:06Very cool.
15:06And in real time, for like 45 minutes, I think one of the astronauts even played violin.
15:11It was really exciting.
15:13And all of these next commercial stations, they have these laser-based communications.
15:18And so we start off the same way that, you know, a company like Tesla with Optimus or Figure or any of your favorite current robotics companies do, with expert human examples.
15:29And we record loads and loads of data where the physics of the robot is actually embedded in the scene.
15:35And we take the telemetry data from the robot and that video data.
15:38And this is where, like, the quote-unquote AI part comes in.
15:41And we can train models that can then do the high-level primitives.
15:45So instead of a human operating this thing forever, we can then say, move the bag from node 1 to node 2.
15:51Open the bag and get the wrench.
15:53And the robot can actually act upon those primitives and do it without a human interacting the entire time.
15:59Yeah.
16:00Very cool.
16:02At any point, do you get to go to space?
16:04Slash, would you want that?
16:06I don't think we're going to space anytime soon.
16:09I think the closest is going to be that parabolic flight where, you know, you get to experience zero G for, like, 20 seconds, 30 seconds.
16:17Yeah.
16:17So I want you to reflect for a moment.
16:20You dropped out or went on leave.
16:22Went on leave from Caltech to build this company.
16:26Was that the right decision?
16:27I think I've learned more in the last year and a half than I have in, I wouldn't say all my undergrad, but in a large portion of it.
16:40They say Caltech is like drinking from a fire hose.
16:43Okay.
16:44And that's very true.
16:45And I definitely wouldn't be in the position that I'm at without studying there and working with the most amazing professors there from everything from formula student cars to lunar rover programs, right?
16:57But I think it's just been so invaluable the last year, year and a half, and all the people that you meet.
17:03And there's a funny story of, like, we come, both Jamie and I, my co-founder, into this world as just engineers.
17:10And we want to make an impact.
17:13And, like, the thing we say is you only have one chance to do your life's work.
17:16Why wait?
17:17And the story that goes with this is, you know, angel investors are a very large part of getting any company off the ground before you go to institutions like venture capitalists or private equity or whatever it might be.
17:30And the very first angel investor that we sit down and have a meeting with is Charlie Songhurst.
17:36But he's on the board of Meta.
17:37Okay.
17:38And we had no idea what it looked like to take investment at all.
17:42We'd heard the term safe.
17:44We didn't know what a simple agreement for future equity was.
17:48And at the end of the call, he had heard about us from some other folks that we had met.
17:53And he's like, I love the idea.
17:55I met you.
17:55I talked to you guys.
17:56I love it even more now.
17:57I need to be a part of it.
17:59And he gave us some really stalwart advice afterwards.
18:01But he said, I would love to write a check right now.
18:04It's like, let's do 75K, 100K.
18:07Like, what are you guys thinking?
18:08Let's just get it done.
18:09And we're like, how does that work?
18:12And he had to explain the entire process to us of what it looked like to actually start a company and take investment.
18:18And so to go from that to now working with some IPO in space and defense companies and actually have our own robotics launching to the ISS commercially, be working with people like NASA, be working with people like Voyager, VAST, is just this amazing trajectory.
18:35Yeah, from everything you've learned in this past year about business specifically, is there one key lesson that you keep really close?
18:44Yeah, I think the biggest thing is the people matter the most.
18:48A lot of people say this, like, and it might be a little bit of a cliche, but everything is so relationship driven.
18:55And you wouldn't believe how much of work and business, whether it be even a university college grant to work on a project or the next commercial space station, comes down with just people's relationships with each other and aligning their goals and what they want to do.
19:13And if I could go back and tell myself in the beginning of this, and actually even in the beginning of college, that those relationships matter so much, that would be, like, the one piece of advice I'd go back and say, like, you know, Ethan, you just met Kip Thorne.
19:27He's a Nobel laureate in physics.
19:29You should really go talk to him and, like, try to get his phone number or shoot him an email and say, thanks for talking to me.
19:36That's definitely something I feel like I missed out on.
19:39That's a really great point.
19:40And as, you know, as a first generation American, you know, like, what does, how has that been a factor?
19:47You know, given the state of politics right now, how, how do you feel?
19:53Yeah.
19:53Let's just start there.
19:54Yeah.
19:55Well, slight correction, second generation.
19:57Okay, sorry.
19:58No, no worries.
19:58No worries.
19:59Yeah.
20:00But it's just an interesting climate.
20:02I think, you know, everything from what we're seeing geopolitically, even in our work, to what's going on with folks that we bring on to the team.
20:12You know, Jamie's an immigrant himself.
20:14He's from Ireland, right?
20:16And we work with the government.
20:17And you have to pass ITAR clearances and EAR and security.
20:22And then we try to sponsor visas because we know what that American dream is like.
20:26And that's always something that's been really, really key to us.
20:29You know, I think, like, I told you a bit about this story, but my father, right, he came to this country and he goes into the military after a very rough upbringing.
20:40And he's from Mexico.
20:41My family's from Mexico.
20:42And, you know, I get to watch him go from, you know, uneducated to his associate's degree, his bachelor's, his master's, his Ph.D.
20:52And we just watch this man give us so much opportunity.
20:55And that's the true American dream.
20:58And me, my brothers, we've all capitalized on the opportunity that he's given me or given us, rather.
21:04And I think that's something that we try to pay forward.
21:07You know, the NASA internship that I got when I was 17, very recently, it's a program called NASA Hunch.
21:13It lost funding in the budget shakeup.
21:16And one of the things that was so important to me is I wouldn't have been here without that program, without that teacher, without Dr. Gold, my mentor there.
21:23And I heard about it.
21:24I was like, let me just sponsor my high school so they can do it for one more year.
21:30I'll pay for it out of pocket.
21:32And that's because of opportunity and what's done in my life.
21:37And luckily enough, the program actually got funding back from a different directorate.
21:41But I still keep close ties to those people.
21:43And I think, you know, what's going on in the country, there's a lot of negative.
21:47And people like to focus on the negative and talk about it a lot.
21:50But I think there's still those pieces of gold in the U.S. and that American dream that everybody can strive for.
21:57And I think we should probably spend more time looking at the good and helping people get to that rather than talking about the negative.
22:04Absolutely.
22:05And to the people who are chasing those dreams, especially the young people in engineering and sciences, what is, you know, a piece of advice you would give them?
22:15Don't stop.
22:16Don't stop.
22:17I think the one thing that both of my parents did was they never said any goal was too big.
22:24My mom was the first person in her family to go to college.
22:27And she gave up her career to raise me and my three knucklehead brothers.
22:31Right.
22:31And the one thing they never said, no dream is too big.
22:36And I think that's that's so key, because at every point in my career where I thought maybe maybe it might be just a little too much to strive for this.
22:46Maybe maybe it's not for me.
22:47Maybe I needed a parent who had built a company before to go build my own to know what it's like.
22:54It's not true.
22:56It's not true.
22:56You can really do anything.
22:58And I think that's the one thing that I always take from them.
23:00Yeah.
23:01And I know your dream is just getting started with robots in space.
23:05But what's the long term vision with Icarus?
23:09Yeah.
23:10So it's such a long term timeline of what we're working on.
23:14And the impact is so massive.
23:16And I've touched on it a little bit in what we talked about earlier.
23:20But I'll give a more concrete example.
23:23I said the number one cancer therapeutic on Earth is from developed from in space research.
23:28And it's called Keytruda.
23:29It made $25 billion in revenue just the last fiscal year.
23:33And it's treated millions of people with cancer and saved millions of lives.
23:37And if you can find the next Keytruda, it's an environment that you can only find the next Keytruda in.
23:43It's space.
23:44And there's only been 700 astronauts in all of history.
23:48It's not going to be the astronauts that are doing it, unfortunately.
23:51They're going to be moving the science forward.
23:52But in order to scale it, you really need something that can push it forward.
23:57And it's the same thing in all these other industries.
23:59Like, we can even print new organs in space now with 3D bioprinting.
24:04You know, very recently we printed someone's meniscus, right?
24:07And I tore my meniscus.
24:08I wish I could get a new meniscus.
24:09And we've printed one in space.
24:11And it's amazing what we can do.
24:14And so I think for us, in the one, like, north star that we put is, you know, half of the entire Earth's GDP comes from labor.
24:22And if the human race is going to go to the moon, go to Mars, and actually unlock the secrets of the things that can benefit humanity, it has to be a robotic labor force.
24:33And that's what we want to build and enable.
24:36And another timely issue right now is climate change.
24:39How do you think about that with Icarus?
24:41And is there any kind of, you know, you mentioned how space can, you know, with cancer research, is there anything where robotics can help with, you know, sustainability and fixing the damage that has been done?
24:57Well, terrestrially, for certain.
24:58But I'll focus my answer in more on in space, just because it's more in our wheelhouse.
25:05But one of the biggest things that we do to actually track climate change is we use satellite imagery.
25:10We use hyperspectral imagery.
25:11And we see this massive launch capability with SpaceX and these new rockets that are coming online from Blue Origin or the ULA.
25:20And these satellites that we use allow us to track climate change in real time.
25:25But the thing is, as we make these constellations larger, and we actually get more and more data from them to help us make actionable insights on Earth, you now run into the issue of hardware failures.
25:38And so as Starlink hits, I think, like, what, 7,000 satellites in orbit, and as we see people moving data centers out to space so you can take free energy rather than the thousands of gallons of water on Earth and the energy production with the coal plants,
25:53we can put it in space, and we can put it in space, and it can be sustainable.
25:56But all of these things, they need maintenance.
25:59A good example is Microsoft did an underwater data center off the coast of San Francisco.
26:05And the main reason why it failed was things just broke.
26:08And space is the same exact way.
26:10And so if we can enable some of these industries to move away from the Earth and also benefit the Earth, like tracking climate change,
26:18then we can keep those systems tip-top shape and actually upgrade them.
26:22That's a great way for our robotics to come into play in the future once we have nailed down the IV.
26:27Yeah.
26:28So it's a long-scale timeline, but that's something that we would really love to get into in the future.
26:32Yeah.
26:33It makes a lot of sense to me.
26:35Most important question, why is it named Acarus?
26:37Well, there's two funny stories that go with this.
26:43One is like the more real story, and the other one is the story that we've come up with after we've really thought about it,
26:49and it's become a core part of our identity.
26:51The first story is when we went through this program called Entrepreneur First, Jamie and I.
26:57It's where we first met.
26:58It's a program where they just bring people with cool backgrounds to work on a passion for the summer that could potentially turn into a company.
27:03They told us we had gotten the funding for the next few months.
27:09And at the time, our company name was Aura.
27:14And we heard it immediately, and we were like, oh, no, it can't be this.
27:18And they were like, okay, but we have to incorporate the company to give you guys an investment so you can start working on this.
27:23You have to give us a name, like, quick.
27:25And we were just throwing stuff out, throwing stuff out, and Jamie comes up with Acarus.
27:30And we're like, yeah, that's cool.
27:31I like that.
27:32I like that.
27:33It's really cool.
27:34And then we went with it in the moment, but afterwards, we sat down and we thought about it for a while.
27:40And we both said that when we built this company, we're going to take the biggest swing possible, you know, only one time to do your life's work.
27:48And the story of Acarus is someone that had ambition but also hubris.
27:54And, you know, he flew too close to the sun.
27:56And it's a bit on the nose for his base company, right?
27:59But the second part of this story is his father says, don't fly too high.
28:04But also don't fly too low or else your wings will get wet and you'll crash in the sea.
28:08And it's this thing where you could keep your head down and you could play it safe and you could go and you could get an engineering job and work at a big engineering firm.
28:18And you could live a very happy life and end up engineering door cards in a Tesla for the rest of your life.
28:25There's nothing wrong with this.
28:26It's amazing.
28:27But if you want to make a real impact, everything has come from someone having ambition.
28:32But the thing is, the name in and of itself is a great reminder to not have that hubris.
28:38It's to be ambitious but have measured execution and keep it within the balance.
28:43So strive for more, strive to make something great, but remember what can happen if you don't do it correctly.
28:50And so that's become just core to our identity.
28:53And what keeps you driven?
28:55What keeps you driven?
28:56Seriously, as someone who's taken on what, you know, seems like a very, it's a challenge, you know.
29:05So what keeps you going when things don't work out?
29:11This is more often than not.
29:13I think the biggest thing is for everyone on the team, it's the mission of what we're doing.
29:21It might sound corny, but I think everybody that we work with and everyone on our team from, you know, Indigo to Demetrius to Corey,
29:31the mission of what we're doing and what it unlocks is so important that when it's, you know, 10 p.m.
29:37and something goes wrong and we have a demo to ship in the morning, it's not even a conversation of, you know,
29:43if we're in the office until three in the morning, four in the morning when it's done.
29:46It's just something that happens and no one really talks about it,
29:50but it's all because we care so much about the problem and what we're solving and we see the future of what it unlocks.
29:55And so I think that's like one of the biggest things for me and for everyone on the team.
30:02And I would say the other thing is, you know, it's very like once in a lifetime that you get to be a kid
30:10that at a very young age got to work on something that is in the ISS, right?
30:17It's just wild and you get to meet these like superstars on Zoom conferences, like astronauts.
30:25And now for me personally, like we talk to them on Zoom calls all the time.
30:31Like we were on a call recently with Chris Hadfield, who I watched in like elementary school
30:35playing ukulele and guitar in the space station and showing what water was like
30:40and how it makes perfect spheres.
30:43And so for me, it's just wild to be that kid once upon a time looking at that
30:49and now be in that world where I not only get to work with these people,
30:55but also get to learn from them.
30:58Absolutely.
30:59Well, I can't wait to see where Icarus goes.
31:01And thank you so much for joining me.
31:04No, thank you so much.
31:05I appreciate it.
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