Altius Space Machines Altius Space Machines Altius Space Machines is a seed-stage startup company that is developing a novel rendezvous and capture technology for uncooperative satellites. The company's products both enable, and are enabled by, the more recent lower-cost access to space epitomized by NewSpace launch companies such as SpaceX, Virgin Galactic and XCOR Aerospace. In July 2011, Altius Space Machines won first place in the "2011 NewSpace Business Plan Competition" in Silicon Valley, sponsored by the Space Frontier Foundation. Altius won a contract with DARPA in July 2012 to build a composite extensible robotic boom arm for the DARPA Phoenix project. They
Space tourism fly on Soyuz TMA-14 in March 2009. British-American Richard Garriott became the next space tourist in October 2008 aboard Soyuz TMA-14. As of 2018, Canadian Guy Laliberté is the most recent tourism to fly to the ISS, in September 2009 aboard Soyuz TMA-16. Since the Space Shuttle was retired in 2011, Soyuz once again became the only means of accessing the ISS, and so tourism was once again put on hold. Bigelow Aerospace acquired the designs for inflatable space habitats from NASA's Transhab program, and has already launched two first inflatable habitat modules. The first, named Genesis I, was launched