Planned Daily Updates from Altius Space Machines

Remember the days of reading the Armadillo updates every Monday?!  I miss that level open communication by a New Space company.  I know some of Armadillo's customer's prevent them from sharing everything, but I enjoyed feeling a part of Armadillo's efforts each week.

That is why I am excited that Altius Space Machines just announced an intense effort to mature their "Sticky Boom" docking tool.  And through that "sprint" as they call it, Altius intends to blog daily on their progress - good or bad - words or pics or video.  Their website makes it sound like a pretty aggressive development schedule to develop their "Sticky Boom".

The Altius website described Sticky Boom as a long boom with a sticky pad on the end that can:

get meaningful adhesion to almost any material imaginable. Plastic, metal, rock, ceramic, MLI or MMOD blankets. Flat surfaces, curved surfaces, multi-faceted surfaces, completely random surfaces like NEOs. Even dust or regolith for that matter. You get all of the “contact at a distance” benefits that Kirk and Joseph Bonometti talked about, while also enabling secure connection with “non-cooperative” objects like uncontrolled satellites, Mars Sample Return sample canisters, space junk, and even asteroids or comets.

Altius says they have one month to get a Sticky Boom prototype ready for a ZeroG micro-gravity flight in May 2011.   This "sprint" should be fun to watch.   Good luck Altius Space Machines - we are cheering for you.  Follow Altius's Sprint here.