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General Astronautics

2 open
2+ employees

Robotics for Space R&D

YC W26

About the Company

General Astronautics builds the robotic labor force for space. Our autonomous dexterous robotic arms operate without astronaut intervention in microgravity, enabling pharmaceutical, semiconductor, and fiber optic production that outperforms what is achievable on Earth. Microgravity is a proven manufacturing frontier and decades of research have established its advantages. We are building the platform that finally makes it commercially accessible at scale.

Tech Stack

Our autonomous robotic arms are designed for small form factor deployment and operate without human intervention in microgravity. The core technical challenge is applying the cutting edge of robot learning and reasoning to a data-denied environment where microgravity manipulation datasets are scarce, physics behave differently, and teleoperation latency rules out human fallback. Our stack spans low-level real-time arm control, multi-camera perception and localization, and learned manipulation policies trained on both open-source datasets and proprietary microgravity-specific data. We combine decades of accumulated space biology and materials research with modern robotics and machine learning to build a system that generalizes across novel lab tasks in orbit. The result is a platform that makes the known commercial value of orbital drug, semiconductor, and fiber optic production finally accessible at scale.

Founders

Bram Schork
Bram Schork

Bram is a Caltech aerospace engineer who founded General Astronautics after building hardware reliability systems for SpaceX's Starlink Lasers, shipping industrial autonomous robots, and developing optical tracking systems at SBIR-funded startups. Microgravity unlocks better pharmaceuticals, semiconductors, and advanced materials. The bottleneck is labor, not science, and robots can solve that now.

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