 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 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."