Steve Altes

In 2014, Altes ran a Kickstarter campaign which raised $43,098 to finance the illustration of a graphic novel he had written about hacks at MIT, titled Geeks & Greeks. The graphic novel was illustrated by Andy Fish and was published in 2016 to generally positive reviews.

In 2006, the humor editor Judy Brown selected twenty of Altes's jokes to appear in her anthology Joke Express: Instant Delivery of 1,424 Funny Bits from the Best Comedians.

In 2005, Altes was a contributor to Michael J. Rosen's anthology, May Contain Nuts: A Very Loose Canon of American Humor. His piece satirized his career as a male model.

In 2001, a sequel, If You Jam the Copier, Bolt was published by Andrews McMeel Publishing.

In 1997, Altes's The Little Book of Bad Business Advice was published by St. Martin's Press.

Altes has appeared in a number of films and television shows after being accidentally "discovered" and cast as a German terrorist in Die Hard With a Vengeance in 1995.

After college, Altes worked as a space policy analyst for the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment. He left Congress for a position as program control manager for the Pegasus air-launched space booster at Orbital Sciences Corporation. In 1991, Altes was part of the Orbital Sciences team that was awarded the National Medal of Technology (the United States' highest award for technological achievement) by President George H. W. Bush for developing Pegasus. He is a co-recipient of the 1990 Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum Trophy for Current Achievement in Aerospace.

In the mid-1990s, Altes left engineering for a career in entertainment and writing.

Altes holds three degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT): S.B., Aeronautics and Astronautics, 1984; S.M., Aeronautics and Astronautics, 1986; and S.M., Technology and Policy, 1986.

In 1982, Altes was part of the MIT team that set a world land-speed record for a human-powered vehicle using a five-person, forty-foot-long "bicycle". His master's thesis, "The Aerospace Plane: Technological Feasibility and Policy Implications", was reviewed by James Fallows in The New York Review of Books in 1986.

Altes was born on November 13, 1962, in Syracuse, New York. He graduated from Fayetteville-Manlius High School in Manlius in 1980. In high school, Altes once ran a track meet in clown make-up. In 2000, when Altes was inducted into the Fayetteville-Manlius Hall of Distinction as one of the high school's "notable alumni", he acknowledged the dichotomy in his career segue from engineering to entertainment, saying, "I owe a tremendous debt to those dedicated teachers for the serious half of my career. For the silly half, I’d like to thank all the class clowns."