Even astronauts do grunt work, including routine maintenance and organizing cargo. It’s a waste of precious time and 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 was a NASA HUNCH student in high school at 17, where he explored autonomous plant growth for Space Station applications. Ethan 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.