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.

Comments

They can patent that?

[Anonymous Coward]

Damn! I'm going to have to start patenting all those 'inventions' by Newton. The first one I'm going to call gravity (TM).

Re:They can patent that?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's a bad name and will never be approved. A better one is "a procedure to transport a payload from one point to another by the use of an attractive force that is proportional to the mass of the payload and a reference object and is inversely proportional to the square of the distance of separation between the respective centers of mass". This one will be approved in a heartbeat and you can immediately use it to sue the airlines. See if you can get an injunction to prevent airplanes in flight from violating your patent. And if they crash you can sue the estates of the passengers!

Re:They can patent that?

[pieterh]

No, this is a myth. New ideas get shared because they are very hard to keep secret. Patents do not promote disclosure of ideas that can be kept secret, they protect ideas that will inevitably be shared or reinvented in any case.

And since patented ideas cannot be reused or expanded on, patents reduce the sharing and reuse of knowledge, they do not promote it. Overall, patents are very harmful for technological progress. This is why, e.g. oil companies collect patents on solar power, and telecoms firms collect patents on VoIP.

The real purpose of patents is to make money for patent holders, patent experts, and patent lawyers. Anyone who says differently is lying or ignorant. Period.

Re:They can patent that?

[dabadab]

New ideas get shared because they are very hard to keep secret.

And that, my liege, is why patents were not meant to apply to ideas but to actual inventions.
Having the idea that some elastic stuff would come really handy, but that's just an idea that anyone can come up with. But, on the other hand, the process of vulcanization is an entirely different beast: it can be kept a secret rather effectively and it really takes some hard work (or huge luck) to come up with that.

Re:They can patent that?

[iminplaya]

If it crashes into a graveyard, my patented algorithm will determine where to bury the survivors.

What a ridiculous waste

[seifried]

What a ridiculous waste of time, money and energy. This is sickening.

This is what happens...

[ulash]

...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.

Re:why don't they just

[seifried]

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.

Jurisdiction?

[Kooshman]

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.

Re:Jurisdiction?

[Anonymous Coward]

Even if the patent is "valid", what jurisdiction would it have in space? None, I'm sure. So all SES Americom would have to do is relocate themselves into geosynchronous orbit, and Bob's your uncle!

Seriously though, from TFA:

Industry sources have told SpaceDaily that the patent is regarded as legal "trite", as basic physics has been rebranded as a "process", and that the patent wouldn't stand up to any significant level of court scrutiny and was only registered at the time as "the patent office was incompetent when it came to space matters".

So, it's a moot point. We can't really be sure why SES Americom isn't pursuing this. For all we know, they're confident they'd win---but it might screw their chances for a reasonable settlement on their other suit against Boeing.

Or, maybe, the satellite would have crashed into the sea by the time they got a resolution.

Jurisdiction?

[countach]

Even if the patent is "valid", what jurisdiction would it have in space?

Re:Please read whole story before writing summary

[BadAnalogyGuy]

splash the satellite

That's a euphemism for having sex with a pregnant woman. Well, it is now.

Re:Lunar flyby to fix geostationary orbit problem?

[Anonymous Coward]

http://cat.inist.fr/?aModele=afficheN&cpsidt=17659402

I wonder if the satellite is faulty...

[Keramos]

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.

here's the lunar flyby trajectory

[ChrisCampbell47]

I remember when they pulled off that lunar flyby method to save the satellite. It was May 1998 and the AsiaSat 3 launch had been presumed a complete failure, just like AMC-14 this time. The lunar flyby option uses the satellite's own fuel (instead of a booster) to slowly, over weeks, nudge the satellite's apogee further out until it reached the moon's orbit. It flew by the moon as the moon itself was flying around the earth, and the result was that the moon's gravity pulled the satellite in the right direction to get it going towards a useful GEO orbit.

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.

Re:method patent

[rhendershot]

This had to be a joke, thought I.

It isn't. Here's the USPTO page. OMG...

Patent Granted: Tarzan Swinging

Lastly, it should be noted that because pulling alternately on one chain and then the other resembles in some measure the movements one would use to swing from vines in a dense jungle forest, the swinging method of the present invention may be referred to by the present inventor and his sister as "Tarzan" swinging. The user may even choose to produce a Tarzan-type yell while swinging in the manner described, which more accurately replicates swinging on vines in a dense jungle forest. Actual jungle forestry is not required.

Licenses are available from the inventor upon request.

Re:method patent

[SharpFang]

Wouldn't Tarzan be a prior art?

Re:You MORONS.

[justthisdude]

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..." After all the arguments over Homosexuality being inborn or a choice, it turns out it is just a work-around to avoid patent infringement!