Attempts to salvage a wayward GEO comsat have come unstuck in the face of institutional disinterest and an aging patent of questionable validity…
SpaceDaily has now learned that a plan to salvage AMC-14 was abandoned a week ago when SES gave up in the face of patent issues relating to the lunar flyby process used to bring wayward GEO birds back to GEO Earth orbit…
Sources have told SpaceDaily that it was possible to bring AMC-14 back via the moon to a stable GEO orbit where the high powered satellite would have been able to operate for at four years and probably longer.
Because SES is currently suing Boeing for an unrelated New Skies matter in the order of $50 million dollars – Boeing told SES that the patent was only available if SES Americom dropped the lawsuit.
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”.
Essentially, SES was going to slingshot the AMC-14 sat around the moon and into geostationary orbit. Boeing “owns” a patent on using the Moon’s gravity to do that.
BTW – if you subscribe to DISH TV, this is why you ain’t gonna get a whole nuther bunch of HD channels real soon.
Boeing “owns” a patent on using the Moon’s gravity to do that.
Shouldn’t that patent belong to Sir Isaac Newton or possibly Johannes Kepler? Have I ever mentioned that I hate lawyers?
I got dibs on Earth’s gravity!
Now physics is patentable? What a joke.
#2 you can have earth’s gravity I want the sun’s.
#4 – You can have the sun’s gravity. I’ll be getting royalties from everyone on earth!!! I’ll make millions!!!! Now everyone send me what you owe and there won’t be any problems.
#2 Do you want to keep everyone happy and paying those royalties or would you like to spin off into the cosmos.
Check and Mate.
#2, if I have to pay royalties, I demand that you make repairs. Your faulty gravitational field indicates that my mass is increasing. My lawyers will contact your lawyers.
So can we sue Boeing for coastal flooding? Their satellite slingshotting technique alters the moon’s orbit and therefore must affect the tides. If they’re licensing this technique, they better damn well have a few environmental impact statements on what will happen. 🙂
What am I missing here? SES wants to use the Moon’s gravity to reposition the satellite?==why don’t they just go ahead and do it?
They aren’t, so it seems to me they actually want “something else” from Boeing, like a rocket to attach to the satellite???
Anyway, big tax supported corporate welfare on display when million dollar satellites and earthly services get dunked because of other multi-million dollar disputes.
Waste of resources. Some government should “DEMAND” the satelitte get saved. But we must sacrifice good government to the vagaries of competition?
Is it fair to blame the lawyers? I’m thinking both sides have lawyers so they cancel out? The corruption must be somewhere else. Where could that corruption be?
#7 – So you’re saying that you’re using more than your share of gravity??? If so I will expect a prorated amount to that effect. I see my partners at McDonald’s Hamburgers have been busy increasing my costumer base.
This is strange. Is there enough fuel on a geo-stationary satellite to do a burn that will get them to the moon? One would think if there was they would have enough fuel to put them just about anywhere in earth orbit.
@GigG
I don’t think you have a good handle on orbital mechanics. The point is to use as little fuel as possible and to use the Earth’s and the moon’s gravity to sling shot the satellite into the proper orbit. If you use brute force the way you are suggesting the satellite will run out of fuel.
Improbus has it right. Typically, after all the jiggling about into GSO, there should be enough fuel left to keep things touched up for about 15 years.
The slingshot SES wanted to try would leave enough fuel for 4 years. Enough time for a replacement satellite to be launched.
@#9: By all known accounts this is just a lawyer “battle”. SES doesn’t want or need anything from Boeing to do this. However, if they do, long and expensive lawsuit is certain as indeed Boeing has the patent, no matter how frivolous. Lawyers are expensive. So, the best guess is that SES calculation of the lawyer cost vs. new satellite cost came on the side of the new satellite.
“Even lawyer distribution” you allude at the end just means that the lawsuit will be longer and more expensive.
The understory here is that SES is already suing Boeing for something else.
It sounds like Boeing essentially said: “Drop the suit, use the patent.” SES has declined.
This is all hearsay because I’m too lazy to look it up.
or, I could just RTFA.
Yeah, right! And I hereby claim patent rights to the sun, so start paying up!
#17 Check comment #4. You are a “Rabble Rouser”.
#14–Dusan==thanks. Seems unlikely that you can patent the “idea” of gravity or the slingshot formula’s using moving planets==but that is what the article says.
Patents are used for creating “things”–new and unique things not obvious from prior state of the art. You can’t patent an idea, so the saying goes–just things new ideas create.
Something is still missing. I could quibble on the lawyer thing. I hate quibbles, guess that means I hate lawyers. Actually, I was visiting our States Supreme Court one afternoon and got to listen to some case about whether a word with apostrophe ess on the end of it (as in it’s) was plural or possessive. You couldn’t pay me to spend my time that way.
Boeing should concentrate on fixing its planes instead of making an idiot of itself with trivialities like this.
Rumor is they make money every time the tide rolls in and out. Mother Nature comes out and cuts a check every week.
“Prior art”, if I understand the term correctly. Heinlein described this in at least one of his early novels, the one with the plastic bubbles being used to travel from Earth to the Astroid belt. He screwed up on spinning the bubbles by having the occupant run around the inside of the bubble (net angular momentum would be zero). “Have Space Suit, Will Travel”?
He wasn’t the only one, just the one I can recall enough of.