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 returned aboard Soyuz TM-11. As of 2018, no suborbital space tourism has yet occurred, but since it is projected to be more affordable, many companies view it as a money-making proposition. Most are proposing vehicles that make suborbital flights peaking at an altitude of . Passengers would experience three to six minutes of weightlessness, a view of a twinkle-free starfield, and a vista of the curved Earth below. Projected costs are expected to be about $200,000 per passenger. At the end of the 1990s, MirCorp, a private venture that was by then in charge of the space station, began seeking