SpaceX and Blue Origin Patent Skirmish
SpaceX Challenges Patent Filed by Blue Origin, SpaceRef Business
“An employee of Docket Alarm earlier today posted on tech news blog Slashdot that SpaceX had filled a challenge to the patent owned by Blue Origin for “Sea landing of space launch vehicles and associated systems and methods”, which was granted earlier this year. Blue Origin has three months to provide a preliminary response.”
Marc’s Note: It was bound to happen sooner or later and it is unfortunate as it costs both companies to deal with the challenge. Is this an isolated case or are more patent skirmishes going to be forthcoming?
Keith’s note: The Thunderbirds were doing all of these various launch and landing scenarios – on dry land – and in the water – in the 1960s. Who thought all of this up first?
SpaceX calling landing on a water vessel old hat seems rather odd since it hasn’t been demonstrated yet. I don’t believe “old hat” is a valid legal term. Prior art is and I would hope SpaceX has some to demonstrate to a patent court. Otherwise, it would seem that Blue Origin’s patent would stand.
Demonstration is not required in order to obtain a patent. These types of landings have been described in the literature in the past. The key parameter is whether or not there is anything unique in their approach to the landing on a platform.
Dennis you’ve gone through this process and you are certianly correct. The 3 criteria for a patent are “useful”, “novel” and “non obvious”. I believe that useful is self evident. Non obvious seems kinda gray to me. But Novel it certainly is not. The prior art will certainly void this patent very quickly.
what about not breaking any established physical laws? that is a requirement in Europe, but here in the good ole US you can patent a perpetual motion machine even if it breaks every law of thermodynamics
That falls under the heading of “useful”. Perpetual motion machines cannot work, and if it doesn’t work, then it’s considered not “useful”. A number of devices that are perpetual motion machines or extract energy from the alignment of the planets have been rejected. The individual examiner is most likely to blame when the patent obviously shouldn’t have been granted. A chemical engineer could be reviewing a software invention, or a mechanical engineer could review an electronics invention. Patents are technical, but NOT an exact science.
This patent reminds me of when Hughes patented using geostationary satellites in inclined orbits to save station keeping fuel.
The term SpaceX should have used, en lieu of “old hat”, is “trivially obvious”. I mean, you can’t make a vertical landing on water, with any hope of recovery of the vehicle…so it is “trivially obvious” that if you are going to attempt a “landing” of a reusable launch vehicle somewhere in the ocean, it will have to be on a floating platform / ship / barge, etc…of some sort. I don’t see how Blue Origin’s very broad and general patent will hold up.
It’s not prior art until having been demonstrated? So after SpaceX lands a stage on a barge, Blue Origin’s patent will be automatically void? Because Blue Origin has’t demonstrated anything either!
Agreed Ivor, seems like a pretty weak patent. I should patent “flip cup” I’m sure I can write up a simple little diagram, would actually look quite similar…
It would be a very difficult patent to defend as there is no unique mechanical, physical or chemical invention. SpaceX should win without much difficulty.
Yoshiyuki Ishijima was teaching this in the 90’s according to SpaceX
There are so many patents that could be voided simply by going back to the older NASA technical reports at NTRS, as well as many many many AIAA papers.
I have seen patents granted on technology that was openly developed and used in the Apollo program.
If what Vlad shows is in the literature that was provided publicly, and if Blue Origin did not cite this as prior art, the court tussle will be interesting to watch.
Dennis, I got it off the SpaceX petition
Petitioner Petition 2: https://www.docketalarm.com…
They also mention a Lang who was telling the same thing and a Mand I believe the name was…. Three people who had preached this method long before Blue Origin and SpaceX says they just passed right over the material and implied there was none relating to this.
But Dennis, NTRS would have to be UP for that to happen. Thanks to certain honorable representatives from the great Commonwealth of Virginia… that isn’t always the case.
Dennis is right. I researched the inflatable patents by Bigelow Aerospace back before the Nasa TransHab patents. I Actually found prior art for space inflatables by Lowell Wood at LLNL. But I just read Werner Von Braun’s Mars book this summer. He not only had an inflatable orbital wheel space station idea, he had an inflatable sphere on top of snocat on the martian polar ice fields. Not only are Bigelow’s patents on space inflatables essentially useless, so are Nasa’s!
That would be prior art, a valid argue point for a patent.
Kinda of Amazon vs PayPal in incognito.
Somewhere around 1998, I saw Burt Rutan sketch this very concept in a brainstorming meeting.
Where is the tech, the new idea in this patent? What is this really a diagram of? Isn’t it a patent of a F9R? Is there any special tech in the landing site/barge.
If Spacex where to lose this challenge wouldn’t they be unable to fly a reusable booster and land it anywhere?
Shouldn’t they just have ignored this patent and landed on a barge first?
Does Spacex have a patent on the Falcon 9 R?
No Elon Doesn’t patent because he said the Chinese will ignore the patents anyway.
So isn’t Spacex really challenging this to protect their right to fly reusable boosters?
I don’t think this has anything to do with a barge.
patient ?? Perhaps patent.
Cheers
I guess it’s a shame Blue Origin and SpaceX couldn’t work out a deal . Maybe SpaceX gets a free license in exchange for sharing core descent as well as Grasshopper and F9r flight data with Blue Origin?
Its not so much Blue Origin vs SpaceX. It seems like Bezos and Musk don’t like each other.
In a reverse Godfather, “It’s personal, not business.”
In any event, Blue Origin is so far back so why would SpaceX help them?
Actually Bezos has a long history of patenting the obvious.
“one click ordering” etc.
He’d patent the countdown if he thought he could get away with it.
My experience with the Patent Office is that they will often reject an initial application if it is poorly written, but if the language is exactly the way they like it and there are lawyers on the team, they don’t search for prior art themselves (except in the patent database itself). The patent is issued and the litigants fight it out in court. Everyone wins. The Patent Office gets its fees (like a business it has to support itself entirely by “productivity” in collecting fees) the lawyers get their fees ($250/hr+). Except for the inventor, who has to pay $20-$50K for attorney fees. Usually the victory goes to whoever has the best lawyers.
Contained within your comment and one other here is the true answer to this sort of thing. We must permit and encourage the patent office to adopt a fee structure that includes a nuisance fee, should a filing be obvious or trivial.
Since the P.O. appears to be work averse, an implementation could be that this fee is due retroactively after the patent filing is challenged in court.
Anyone know if Arthur C. Clarke patented the Geo-synchronous orbital satellite? He would have been a gazillionaire.
Clarke –
”I’m often asked why I didn’t try to patent the idea of communications satellites. My answer is always, ’A patent is really a license to be sued.’ ”
Years earlier he wrote an essay; A Short Pre-History of Comsats, Or: How I Lost a Billion Dollars in My Spare Time
He said his lawyer said no, it was too farfetched to patent.
Clarke has given other reasons, including implementation time would exceed the patent duration, alternatively that all the ideas and the math were already out there and he just compiled it and popularized it.
As an aside, the concept of a geosynchronous orbital satellite was described decades before Clarke, even descriptions of optical communications. The genius of Clarke was to see it a a super place for radio relay stations.
http://lakdiva.org/clarke/1…
Just a thought. Isn’t the first stage basically an AIRCRAFT and not a SPACECRAFT as it never reaches orbit. Haven’t we been landing aircraft on those big things called aircraft carriers for 80 or 90 years?
I suppose it could be argued that if the first stage goes beyond 80km altitude it is a spacecraft. We’ll soon see what arguments SpaceX and Blue Origin use.
I don’t believe there’s been any aircraft landed by balancing on a rocket engine thrust.
I think you could argue that thrust is thrust, and any vectored thrust would qualify. So, the Harrier and other vehicles using balanced thrust (regardless of rocket v. jet engine) might qualify.
Here we go again with spacex’s arrogance. This is the most ridiculous thing I have ever heard. I guess the truth of the matter is; Spacex wants to be the monopoly in every way and doesn’t want any competition and will use our legal system to achieve it.
Jerry, yet another rant on SpaceX without any substance. How you equate SpaceX with the a monopoly is beyond rational discussion. Perhaps you should look up the definition before you use the word. The patent system in the U.S. is clearly broken. Now it’s up to the legal system to decide if the Blue Origin patent is valid, which somehow I doubt. This patent move by Blue Origin is a hail mary with the only outcome being slowing done the competition. That’s right, competition, not monopoly.
Always wondered how Bezos even got on this track …. a disgrunted exspacex worker shoot his mouth off to BO or Lockmart that spacex was considering this sometime in the future….
Quite a few “disgruntled” crept out the woodwork lately, which can’t be coincidental in light of Musk’s very public squabble with both the Air Force and ULA (of which Boeing is trying to win that lucrative commercial crew contract ahead of SpaceX)?
Marc, I respectfully disagree with you (and others here) that the patent system is ‘broken’, and here’s why: we are living in an era that excludes exponential knowledge growth with attendant exponential growth in ideas that are far beyond any category that could have been imagined by our Founders.
Indeed, do we really want the PO doing original research on patentability? Imagine such a behemoth! And in the current political environment, another ‘government bureaucrat’, as the right so-often describes them derisively, would be making decisions that- guess what? would go to court anyway.
It makes more sense for the PO to issue new patents, even in marginal cases; the court system is our way of resolving conflicts.
I don’t think the courts are the place to hash these things out. Litigation is the result of failure. The courts should be the last resort, not the first.
Yes, it is broken. Patents are supposed to encourage growth of ideas, not to stifle them. When they are doing opposite, this is time to reform system or, failing that, get rid of them completely.
Very existence of patent trolls alone proves that current system is worthless.
I think it is the exact opposite. SpaceX tries to break thru any impediment to an open competitive space market, such as killing the 36 rocket core sweetheart deal ULA had with USAF, or this unpatentable barge landing.
I think they believe that they will become a virtual monopoly, but based on competitive performance, not games.
As Shotwell said, spacex hopes to be “most widely used space transport company in the… let’s call it the Solar System… (and it would be) great if it were in the galaxy.”
Arrogant, maybe, but anticompetitive, no.
Jerry,
I am curious, leaving out SpaceXs flaws, do you have any special reason to hate those guys? Very directly, do you have any dogs in this hunt? Are you benefiting directly or indirectly from having SpaceX fail?
I don’t think you get what’s going on with this patent claim, and you certainly don’t understand the term “monopoly.” You do understand, don’t you, that is Blue Origin that has the patent on sea landings, don’t you? SpaceX is arguing the patent should be void, thus opening sea landings to everyone.
Actually, to SpaceX’s credit, I think they don’t patent things primarily because that discloses it. If Blue Origin’s patent is upheld, they very likely would use it to suppress SpaceX who is most likely to actually get it to work first.
Jerry, what planet do you live on? Really. Your comments against SpaceX don’t seem consistent with the company by that name operating on planet Earth.
I can’t believe that you can even patent stuff like this. European patent offices would throw you out with junk like this and charge you a penalty for wasting their time.
The Thunderbirds were doing this in the 1960s. https://www.youtube.com/wat…
I loved that show 🙂
Don’t forget the coolest (and final craft – 1968) Thunderbird 6!
http://upload.wikimedia.org…
but the show had no patent laws and lawyers.
Usually it’d be the lawyer who be caught with the helpless rabble that needing rescue — after being abandoned by his client: the corrupt politician/ incompetent engineer/ snake-oil entrepreneur/ investment con-man/ or evil bald commie scientist — whose actions caused the I-R grade disaster in the first place!
BTW, I realize this discussion is with SpaceX, but if you slap some bright yellow paint all over it, DreamChaser would make a cool TB 4 (just don’t dip it in the water)
But everyone was attached to strings – which is what lawyers tend to do…
I call “dibbs” on everything in “Fireball XL5” and “Supercar”.
Only Thunderbird 3 was a rocket – TB1 and TB2 were atomic-powered jet aircraft. TB4 was a submarine, so not much prior art there! The big launch/landing advance associated with TB3 was the ability to launch through a hole in the middle of a doughnut-shaped house, and then manage to land tail-first in the same location! Oh, and there was, of course, the famous (failed) underwater manned launch attempt after that bridge collapsed…
…from a similar point in time, however, the SSTO in the James Bond movie ‘You Only Live Twice’ made a very fair stab at a vertical landing beside the launch pad!
I’m curious to what BO thinks of all this — being rather notorious for flying under the radar and all. Will probably have to wait right to the end of that three months to find out. Have to give them credit — not easy in this day/age to be so tight-lipped. The lack of any information coming from BO land makes one wonder if they are even still in business.
The Patent Office is a bunch of morons with barely high school education, they will grant you a patent on perpetual motion machine that generates output power.