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 and flew on STS-118 as a mission specialist. A second journalist-in-space program, in which NASA green-lighted Miles O'Brien to fly on the space shuttle, was scheduled to be announced in 2003. That program was canceled in the wake of the Columbia disaster on STS-107 and subsequent emphasis on finishing the International Space Station before retiring the space shuttle. Initially, senior figures at NASA strongly opposed space tourism on principle; from the beginning of the ISS expeditions, NASA stated it wasn't interested in accommodating paying guests. The Subcommittee on Space and Aeronautics Committee On Science of the House of Representatives held