A Robot Named JOY Is Heading to the Space Station in 2027. Here Is Who Is Paying for Its Batteries.
Startup Icarus Robotics has picked KULR Technology Group to supply the power systems for its free-flying robot. The deal is small but the numbers behind it reveal just how expensive, and how promising, robotic labor in space could become.
Key points
- Icarus Robotics announced on 9 July 2025 that KULR Technology Group will supply batteries for JOY, its free-flying robot bound for the International Space Station.
- JOY is scheduled to launch in early 2027 on a mission called JOYRIDE-1.
- KULR's K1S battery system has already flown on NASA's Artemis II crewed lunar mission, giving it a safety record that speeds regulatory approval.
- Icarus Robotics raised $6.1 million in seed funding last year to turn its prototype into a production-ready machine.
- NASA estimates it costs $130,000 an hour to keep an astronaut alive in space, which is the core business case for sending robots instead.
A small New York startup wants to put a free-floating robot inside the International Space Station, the orbiting laboratory where astronauts live and work. To do that, it first had to solve a surprisingly hard problem: finding a battery NASA would actually allow on board.
Icarus Robotics announced this week that KULR Technology Group, based in Webster, Texas, will supply the power systems for JOY, its autonomous free-flying robot. Autonomous here means the robot can move and steer without a person controlling it by hand.
The chosen battery is KULR's K1S system. It's already flown on Artemis II, NASA's crewed mission that loops around the Moon. That flight history matters enormously, as first reported by The Robot Report.
"In the space domain, flight heritage is everything," Icarus co-founder and CEO Ethan Barajas told The Robot Report. "If you can point NASA to components that have already worked in space, the approval process moves much faster."
Why does the battery choice matter so much?
NASA's rules for batteries near astronauts are strict for a clear reason: a battery fire in a sealed spacecraft is catastrophic. Any battery pack above 80 watt-hours, roughly the capacity needed to power an untethered robot like JOY, falls into the agency's top danger category. NASA calls that tier, in its own official language, "catastrophic."
At that level, NASA requires that if one battery cell overheats and goes into what engineers call thermal runaway, the heat can't spread to neighbouring cells. KULR's K1S stops that spread passively, meaning no active electronics need to intervene. The system also has to survive launch vibration, vacuum conditions, and solar radiation.
For now, an astronaut will plug JOY in manually. Autonomous docking and charging will come later, once the robot has built up a safety record on the station.
The business case is blunt. Icarus says keeping one astronaut alive in space costs $130,000 per hour. Much of that time goes to sleeping and exercising to stay healthy in microgravity. A robot handling routine maintenance frees that expensive human time for science.
We covered Icarus Robotics for the first time on 15 July 2026, when robotics funding was already moving fast. Icarus raised $6.1 million in seed funding last year to reach this point. The 2027 launch is the first step, not the finish line.
One honest takeaway: The economics that make robots attractive in space are the same ones driving automation in warehouses and factories. Watch how quickly Icarus earns full autonomous status from NASA. That timeline will tell you more about how cautiously regulators are willing to hand routine work to machines than any funding announcement will.
