[4] 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".

[1] He left Congress for a position as program control manager for the Pegasus air-launched space booster at Orbital Sciences Corporation.

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,[18] The Washington Post,[12] the Los Angeles Times,[17] The Christian Science Monitor,[19] Capital Style,[20] The Writer,[14] Urban Male Magazine,[21] Funny Times[22] and P.O.V.

[25] In 2014, Altes ran a Kickstarter[26] campaign which raised $43,098 to finance the illustration of a graphic novel he had written about hacks at MIT, titled Geeks & Greeks.

[29] 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.