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This week on SHIFT
What’s an hour of an astronaut's time cost? Somewhere north of $100,000 on the International Space Station, and that’s before anyone pays a salary. Which makes it a spectacularly expensive way to bag trash and unpack groceries: station crews currently burn about two weeks out of every sixty days just moving cargo bags.
This week, we bring you a field trip to the Brooklyn Navy Yard and the home of Icarus Robotics, where co-founders Ethan Barajas (CEO, who started at NASA at 17 and worked on lunar rovers at Caltech) and Jamie Palmer (CTO, ex-Mercedes F1, robotics at Columbia) are building what they call the robotic labor force for space. Jennifer gets a tour of their free-flying, two-armed prototypes — and takes the controls herself.
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Three things to listen for
1. A 2,500-mile test drive.
From their New York office, the team teleoperated robot arms in San Francisco in real time to unpack a flight-ready NASA cargo bag. That’s ten times farther than the ISS, which orbits only about 250 miles up.
2. Faking zero gravity on a glass table.
Their V0 prototype floats on high-pressure nitrogen to mimic microgravity in two dimensions, and every time its arms move, its whole body recoils, part of a 22-degrees-of-freedom control problem the team has to solve before flight.
3. Why the robot has to be cute.
A JAXA experiment found a little talking robot raised astronaut morale and productivity, so human factors became a design requirement. Icarus even sized its machine to NASA's human specs, so space stations don't have to change a thing to host it.
Half of the world's GDP is labor, and if you believe space is going to be big, you have to believe that labor is going to be a massive component of it.
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