28 thoughts on “How Deep Can A Space Patent Suit Go?”

  1. The cycle repeats. Wright-Curtiss wing-warp vs. aileron war, mutates to landing rockets on sea barges.
    However, in this case we have the arbiter (NASA) already in place. Google the beginnings of the NACA.

  2. Someone got a patent for landing a rocket on a barge??? I was under the impression that patents could not be granted to ideas that were obvious.

    1. I was under the impression that patents could not be granted to ideas that were obvious.

      You mean like one-click online ordering?

      Welcome to the 21st Century.

      2. The only thing obvious about one-click was that it was a bad idea, to everyone. You want to store my credit card? Are you insane? Now everyone does it. There should be a special category for anyone who patents something that everyone thinks is stupid and goes on to make it work fantastically well – the patent office should reward them with double terms or something.

  3. I hope these kinds of patents will not end up stifling the US commercial launch sector.

    Patents are a big encumbrance in nascent or immature markets. This is one case of such a market. I can sort of understand the rationale on more well established markets but not in this case.

    Perhaps the USPTO should start demanding that people deliver a working subscale mockup of anything they actually apply a patent for or the companies doing the real world work will get submerged by paper crap and legalese.

  5. I have met a number of people that think that it is just good strategy to get a patent, and then make your fortune by suing anyone that actually makes something like it work. As an inventor myself, I despise that attitude. I hope this is not the case here.

  6. Intellectual property is a bad idea wrapped in good intent (must have been a democrat with a time machine.)

    The idea was to prevent a large institution from monopolizing a small inventors idea but has turned out to often do just the opposite… kill competition.

    It’s now more used as a weapon to defy competition as is clearly the case here.

    1. No, the idea, at least in America, was “to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts.”

      I used to work for a company that patented lots of things, but the only effect was to keep new competitors out of the market, because you couldn’t make similar products without cross-licensing patents from everyone else in the market, and they wouldn’t license them without patents to trade. Which, I would say, is pretty much the opposite of what the patent system was supposed to do.

    2. Actually the whole idea was that it was better to have time limited patents than trade secrets. The patents would describe the product in detail so that it would be preserved for posterity and after the short patent protection period elapsed it would fall back into the public domain. The prior alternative would have been to keep it as a trade secret. Like the formula for making Coca Cola. In the Middle Ages the trade secrets were usually protected inside trade guilds. The glassworks of Venice are particularly infamous in this regard.

      1. Of course the question is if this instead was actually a trade secret of Blue Origin how hard to you think it would have been to reverse engineer what they actually wrote in the patent? I submit that it wouldn’t be hard at all and all the complicated steps like how to make the guidance system and so on are *not* in the patent. So the patent is useless trash just to harm the competition.

  7. I was really taken aback by the comparison of Rand to Amanda Seyfried. She’s arguably the most beautiful woman alive today. But after thinking about it a little, I have decided that Rand is looking pretty good these days, himself… 🙂

  8. Looks like they have a few more days to work the patent problem.

    Staying up late must be a jinx but then again getting up early could be too. The only way to win is not to watch and to wait for the replay. By then, your observations can’t change the outcome.

  9. Is the first stage recovery attempt affected by the delay? That is, is the barge already in the right position, or does it have to be somewhere else fast?

      1. Right, but is it in the right place for the launch three days from now, or does the trajectory change and it is now a thousand miles from where it needs to be?

  10. >> No, it’s always the same azimuth to get to ISS.

    The could target either the ascending or descending node, right?

      1. Aren’t there range problems going to ISS is you launch South? Heck, you might fly over the Bermuda Triangle! 🙂

  11. Didn’t SpaceX only choose a barge landing as a stepping stone to a solid-ground landing (especially since water touchdowns foul the core something fierce)? I thought that they were only doing this because they couldn’t convince anyone in the government to allow land overflight of the reusable stage on its return trip (or, alternatively, because they thought it better to move incrementally to convince themselves and the public that it was safe to have a return flight of the core)?

    Granted, a barge landing allows for greater flexibility in launch trajectories and payload than only having ground landings, but I didn’t think that barge landings were supposed to be SpaceX’s bread-n-butter reusability method.

    1. They may be rethinking flyback to site, given the performance hit. Makes more sense to land down range, then refuel and self-ferry to the launch site. Main issue I see is that they need a bigger barge, or multiple barges, to handle Falcon Heavy.

      1. This may be the first baby step towards landing on land, or a stopgap. Try this on. When they move launches to the South Texas site, won’t Florida make a nice. big landing area downrange from there once they show that landing works. In the mean time, if they have landing problems while shaking things down, they don’t crash on land – which causes all kinds of bad news and it is harder to control the PR.

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