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Satellite Abandoned Due To Orbital Patent
EreIamJH brings news about a commercial geostationary satellite that was launched last month. Due to a launch failure, the satellite did not reach the orbit required to perform its function. The satellite's owner, SES Americom, looked for a way to salvage the satellite, but ran into an unexpected hurdle; a Boeing patent on the lunar flyby process that would be used to correct the satellite's orbit. If another company doesn't purchase the satellite, it is likely to become another piece of space junk. The European Space Agency has posted a gallery of the maps they have put together for man-made debris in orbit around the earth.
Damn! I'm going to have to start patenting all those 'inventions' by Newton. The first one I'm going to call gravity (TM).
What a ridiculous waste of time, money and energy. This is sickening.
...when common sense does not prevail. The company and Boeing need to come to an agreement of sorts in order to avert the turning of the satellite into space debris. We already have enough stuff out there. The fact that there is no explicit "cost" to the company, of leaving something up there is the main reason for the seeming unwillingness for taking action.
Can't we just abandon the whole patent system?
They are suing Boeing in another matter, Boeing told them they could use the patent if they drop the suit (50 million according to the article). Unlikely Boeing will license them the patent.
RTFA. There is an unrelated legal dispute between the two companies and Boeing wanted to tie the licensing of the patent to a settlement of that dispute.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Send more lawyers !
Does anybody know how this patent even has jurisdiction? I understood space to be a legal no-man's land, so any action taken there can't fall under the laws of any nation. Perhaps they could track it back to "sending the signals from earth", at which point you could do the same thing from international waters or an apathetic country.
So in the case that the patent holds in the USA... why not then involving ESA (european Spece Agency) to solve this or other non-american company....besieds the question if patents are applicable outside earth for that matter ;)..wha's next? suing the martians for a patent??
Famous last words:"but...."
Even if the patent is "valid", what jurisdiction would it have in space?
a Boeing patent on the lunar flyby process that would be used to correct the satellite's orbit.
So this amounts to a patent on moving in a given direction? April first passed by almost two weeks ago. C'mon, guys, bad joke?
Unbelievable. We don't need patent reform, we need an angry mob to storm the USPTO and burn the place to dust, then sift through the dust and re-burn anything left, then haul the entire mess to a live volcano. You just can't have a monopoly on basic physics, Boeing, whether or not the rules allow it. Seriously, grow the fuck up and go back to competing with Airbus on technical merits rather than endless pissing contests with the WTO/WIPO.
splash the satellite
That's a euphemism for having sex with a pregnant woman. Well, it is now.
http://cat.inist.fr/?aModele=afficheN&cpsidt=17659402
From the article:
a) Industry sources say the patent is basically worthless
b) Americom wants to collect it's insurance
c) Third party goes to insurer, says "We'll buy the satellite and recover it ourselves"
d) Insurer says "No one told us you could recover satellites" so we haven't taken possession of the satellite (if we did, we'd have to worry about getting rid of it, you see). BTW, good risk evaluation & mitigation, guys. I've got a sandcastle I'd like to insure for $50M vs. water damage. Interested?
e) Third party goes to Americom, says "We'll buy the satellite and recover it ourselves"
f) Americom ignores them, meanwhile tries real hard to de-orbit the satellite really quick.
Now, if this were a movie/book, sticking in "QA finds a problem in the satellite before launch, PHB's decide to launch it anyway, have an unfortunate, totally unforeseen and obviously accidental problem, ditch the unit and collect from insurance" somewhere would fit in naturally.
Hollywood is just a French movie's way of reproducing.'Splashing the satellite' is having wild and poorly aimed sex with a woman, while her uglier and less popular sister is in an uncomfortably close orbit.
ski jump instructions
Time to again draw attention to us patent 6368227: "A method of swing on a swing is disclosed, in which a user positioned on a standard swing suspended by two chains from a substantially horizontal tree branch induces side to side motion by pulling alternately on one chain and then the other."
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/United_States_patent_number:6368227
A question that sometimes drives me hazy: am I or are the others crazy? Einstein
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
I had that trajectory plot (done with AGI's STK, I think) as the desktop image on my computer for 3 years.
Here is what the trajectory looked like. The big tradeoff of this method is that you burn most of the satellite's fuel, fuel that was intended to be used over the 15-year life of the sat for stationkeeping. So you end up with a sat in GEO orbit but with much less lifetime. Better than nothing! Well, except for an insurance payout, I guess.
One simple rule for its versus it's
Okay, so the patent won't stand up to scrutiny.
The company is already in court, suing Boeing on an unrelated issue.
But they won't risk violating this terrible patent, why? Clearly they're more than willing to risk a lawsuit from Boeing.
If the patent is so obviously invalid, it won't take much effort to fight and have it invalidated. And on the off chance they fail, they can argue the issue to a judge, who will decide the value of the infringement, as opposed to Boeing, who refuses to budge.
And time on a satellite is very, very expensive, so they will easily be making tens of millions of dollars on the deal, worst case.
This whole story makes no sense. Sounds like something even shadier is going on under the table, and they'd prefer to use this as cover.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Were I thus inclined, I'd go for the biggest market out there - patent a "procedure to transfer one's hereditry information onto a partial duplicate of oneself or the recreational practice thereof, through the use of a pshysio-mechanical maneuver with an individual of the opposing sex..."
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No - dumping the satellite and collecting the insurance is the smart thing to do. The satellite was supposed to have a 15 year lifespan. With the reduced fuel after the "patented application", it only has 4 years - so they're only going to get about 1/4 the revenue, and still have to launch another one. In other words, their satellite had already lost 3/4 of its' value no matter what.
Since this is slashdot, let's use a car analogy.
You buy a car, and you expect it to last 15 years (okay, you buy a JAPANESE car, and expect it to last 15 years), for $30k. However, just after you take it off the dealer's lot, it gets pretty much totalled. The insurance company will pay to fix it, but it will never be the same, and they've told you that after 4 years, you'll have to scrap it because the repairs will not last beyond that time. In other words, even after everything is "fixed", you'll have to fork out for another car within 4 years ...
You will have spent $60k for 2 cars, for 19 years of combined service, or more than $3k/year.
Or you can take the insurance payout for the full value and buy another new car that will last 15 years. The new car is, essentially, free, so you $30k investment for 15 years brings your cost down to $2k/year.
Scale up the numbers, and they hold true for the satellite company. Keeping the old one will saddle them with additional capital costs of almost 60%.
It isn't. Here's the USPTO page. OMG...
Patent Granted: Tarzan Swinging
Mod parent down. I just looked at the links provided by another poster in this thread, and realized I misread the description of this "lunar flyby" maneuver. It isn't just a resonance, it's an orbital transfer that literally involves a close pass by the moon. The maneuver is useful (I think) to regularize orbits that are both very eccentric and have high inclinations. A high eccentricity orbit can have its apogee (farthest point on the orbit) shifted with little delta-V required if the rocket burn is applied at perigee (closest point to earth along orbit). By doing this, the apogee can be shifted close to the moon, and lunar gravity can very efficiently (compared to a brute force burn) shift the inclination of the orbit.
SES has decided not to pursue any legal options against Boeing and wants to collect their insurance policy payout.
Why operate a satellite for years at diminishing returns when you can get an immediate big payoff? And as a side benefit the blame goes to a competitor whom your are engaged in a lawsuit with. Immoral? Not to them. Just businesses screwing each other. The Insurance company will pass the loss down the chain. Somewhere down the chain I figure I'm going to end up paying in a tax . Especially since the Fed and Congress are into the business of bailing out companies.
Wouldn't Tarzan be a prior art?
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
If I damage my car, my insurance company doesn't just take my word for it that it's totalled and hand me a check. They send an assessor out and THEY decide if the car is salvageable or a total loss. Why in this case is the insurance company so willing to pay up? Why don't they tell SES "Um, you need to at least try to contest that patent before we're paying. We'll cover court fees, but we think that will be much less costly than building and launching a whole new bird." They beancounter the average citizen to death on any/all claims but are willing to fork over $50 million without so much as a word of objection?? Something does indeed sound fishy here.
"We can categorically state we have not released man-eating badgers into the area." - UK military spokesman, July 2007
http://www.cnn.com/TECH/space/9805/13/crippled.satellite/index.html
A CNN article about the procedure and how it was done back when they first tried it.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.