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 since 2009. As an alternative term to "tourism", some organizations such as the Commercial Spaceflight Federation use the term "personal spaceflight". The Citizens in Space project uses the term "citizen space exploration". Many private space travelers have objected to the term "space tourist", often pointing out that their role went beyond that of an observer, since they also carried out scientific experiments in the course of their journey. Richard Garriott additionally emphasized that his training was identical to the requirements of non-Russian Soyuz crew members, and that teachers and other non-professional astronauts chosen to fly with NASA are called astronauts.