Altius has high hopes for Sticky Boom

LOUISVILLE — Space may be the final frontier, but for Jonathan Goff it may also be the new Silicon Valley.

“There’s a huge amount of money to be made in space. In telecommunications and GPS there’s already more than $100 billion a year,” said the founder of Altius Space Machines Inc. of Louisville. “The problem is that there’s not that many launches that go up in any given year.”

Altius in 2011 developed a business plan focusing on small-load deliveries to the International Space Station, employing a robotic arm the company was developing, the Sticky Boom. Altius Space Machines won the $25,000 grand prize in the 2011 Heinlein NewSpace Business Plan Competition, hosted by the Space Frontier Foundation, which helped to focus the efforts of this small Louisville startup on a very specific but necessary aspect of space support and research.

That award not only helped determine the focus of this small engineering startup in Louisville but also gave it a certain cachet to approach other technology organizations working in the space industry. In all, space industry development is not that different from the Internet-based companies of the 1990s, Goff said, where strategic partners cooperated hoping to quickly develop the technologies that would gain widespread commercial application.

Essentially, the Altius Sticky Boom is a 10- to 100-meter robotic arm that allows a spacecraft to reach and grab objects, such as an incoming payload vehicle that wasn’t necessarily designed to hook up with the receiving craft. That would enable the space station to receive these smaller just-in-time payloads from commercial launches, instead of being tied to the larger payloads that are received on a more infrequent basis from cooperating space-station nations.

“Most countries will have their own launch vehicles, but you could have a lot more vehicles in a commercially driven market” that employs smaller launch and satellite vehicles, Goff said. “We’re doing what we can do to try to increase that pace.”

That could be a boon for researching many new technologies at the space station, such as quickly developing new vaccines — a process that’s difficult to fit into the slower pace of the larger payloads. Getting a technology employed on the space station is necessarily an intricate and time-consuming process, but Goff noted that there are many more shorter-term applications where a multiple-use robotic arm could come in handy, such as stocking space fuel depots, servicing satellites, aiding in manned space flights or helping rid Earth’s orbit of space debris.

The company’s robotic arm for “non-cooperative capture” already has attracted attention from American space agencies. For instance, last year Altius signed a non-reimbursable space act agreement with NASA’s Langley Research Center to jointly create a “Compactly Stowable Manipulator,” a robotic capture arm that could be stored easily aboard spacecraft such as the manned Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle being built by Lockheed Martin for NASA.

Altius also has been contracted for engineering services by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory to help develop new capture technology to assist with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s Phoenix project. The project would retrofit older satellites, which still have functioning antenna and solar-power systems, with new components that aid military applications.

The project is exciting because such retrofits also could have commercial applications, Goff said, and the capture technology itself is an extremely interesting technological advancement. The first Sticky Boom had an electrostatic capture end, but the new boom will incorporate JPL’s synthetic Gecko adhesive technology.

The capture technology mimics the lizard’s ability to walk upside down using billions of invisible hairs on its feet, which create a bond similar to that of Velcro. However, it is believed that a gecko’s hairs adapt so precisely to a surface that they actually form a loose molecular bond between surfaces, known as a Van der Wall force.

“If you are trying to grab and stabilize a spinning object in space, you don’t have to exert a huge force,” Goff said. “These are not super, super strong connections, it’s not an electronic locking, but it can grab onto an object and handle misalignment and relative speeds.”

While the Sticky Boom may not find its way onto the space station in the near term, the award has helped Altius gain entry with national labs and commercial partners. One such partner is next door in Boulder’s SpaceX, as the Sticky Boom could have application in the company’s reusable Dragon space vehicle.

“We’re looking at some more near-term deployments right now,” Goff said. “We’re trying to find the right mix of opportunities and the partners to help market them (the resulting technologies).

“It is an exciting and interesting market, and I really believe in trying to create new markets in space. At the same time, we do keep an eye out for terrestrial applications.”

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