Altius Space Machines

Altius Space Machines is a seed-stage startup company that is developing a novel rendezvous and capture technology for uncooperative satellites.[1] 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.[2]

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.[1]

Altius won a contract with DARPA in July 2012 to build a composite extensible robotic boom arm for the DARPA Phoenix project.[3][4][5] They also began work in 2012 developing Gecko-adhesive grippers, as part of work to build a Gecko Gripper Touch-to-Grasp tool that incorporated JPL’s "synthetic Gecko adhesive technology that mimics the ability of Gecko lizards to adhere to walls." The work leveraged previous work done by Altius on uncooperative capture mechanisms using electroadhesion.[6][7]

In 2014, Altius began work on a magnetoshell aerocapture and aerobraking technology for cubesats. Called MIDAS, Multi-Purpose Interplanetary Deployable Aerocapture System, the 6U cubesats will be designed to be used on an interplanetary mission such as to Mars, Venus, or Jupiter's moon Europa[8][9]

Other work includes the "Kraken Asteroid Boulder Retrieval System." In late 2014, Altius expects to test prototypes of grasping arms and non-force-closure gripper concepts for capturing a boulder off the surface of an asteroid. The study is funded by NASA as part of their broader Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM) project, and is intended to mature system concepts and key technologies while assessing the feasibility of potential commercial partnerships for ARM.[10]

In 2015 Altius win contract to build :lightweight robotic manipulators, that utilize rollable composite STEM booms to provide a prismatic extension/retraction DOF, as robot arms for Assistive Free-Flyers (AFFs) on the International Space Station. These Low-Inertia STEM Arm (LISA) manipulators can provide comparable or better manipulation capabilities to AFFs than traditional robotic manipulators, but with less mass, lower inertia, better stowability, and the ability to reach into very hard-to-access locations.:[11][12]