Steve Altes

Early life

Altes was born on November 13, 1962 in Syracuse, NY. He graduated from Fayetteville-Manlius High School in Manlius, NY 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."

Engineering

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

In 1982 Altes was one of five in a MIT team on a forty-foot-long "bicycle" that set a world land-speed record for a human-powered vehicle. 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.

After college, Altes worked as a space policy analyst for the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment. He left Capitol Hill 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 nation's highest award for technological achievement) by President George H. W. Bush for developing Pegasus. He is also a co-recipient of the 1990 Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum Trophy for Current Achievement in Aerospace.

Due to his varied endeavors in the fields of engineering and entertainment, Altes is sometimes listed as one of MIT's more "notable alumni."

Entertainment

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

Essays

Altes has written a series of first-person participatory adventure essays about experiences such as:

These essays have appeared in magazines and newspapers like Salon, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, The Christian Science Monitor, Capital Style, The Writer, Urban Male Magazine, Funny Times, and P.O.V.

Books

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

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

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

In 2006 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 2014 Altes ran a Kickstarter campaign which raised $43,098 to finance the illustration of a graphic novel he wrote about hacks at MIT titled Geeks & Greeks. The graphic novel was illustrated by Andy Fish and was published in 2016 to generally positive reviews.

Film appearances

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.

Print modeling

Altes has worked as a commercial print model and hand model.

Other

Altes has also been:

Awards

Personal

Altes lives in the Los Angeles area and is married to acting coach Diana Jellinek.