The patent on the Space Shuttle has expired | Hacker News Reader

The patent on the Space Shuttle has expired

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99 pointsdonohoe45 comments

This isn't a patent on the Space Shuttle. It's a patent on an "improved" space shuttle where the External Tank is placed in front of the orbiter. (I didn't read why, but I assume it's to minimize various losses.)

Given the problems with foam shedding on the actual ET, it's probably a good thing they didn't adopt this configuration.

I checked, and it's actually somewhat buildable - if my back-of-the-envelope math is right, it's shorter than a Saturn V.

Seems like the worst of both worlds in terms a vertical vs horizontal configuration. you've still got two unthrottled SRB's right next to you, and now you've increased the odds of them hitting the liquid tank if they detach.

Title is a bit misleading. Looks like this patent actually expired quite a while ago, as it was filed in 1974 and granted in 1975. I think it would have expired 17 years from the date it issued, or Feb. 18, 1992.

You are correct in your computation of the expiration date.

Why this was posted now, when it expired over 20 years ago, I am unsure.

This would make a fine addition to the ones collected here [1] for decorative purpose!

[1]: http://www.howacarworks.com/blog/iconic-patent-posters

"Fig." notation on LEGO patents is very appropriate.

My son has some of the Lego ones framed on his wall.

Some of those are really surprising. Notably the Monopoly one (I would have though that would be a copyright) and the floppy disk one (filed 1995, really?).

Monopoly the name and logo would be trademarked. Monopoly's board design and text would be copyrighted. Monopoly's mechanism of action (how you play the game) would be patented.

More or less, IANAL, etc.

A patent for an early 3-inch disk and drive mechanism was filed in 1980 [1]. The inventor was working on it since the early seventies [2].

[1] https://www.google.com/patents/WO1981001906A1

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_floppy_disk#The...

Electric guitar in 1959, too. That's a very long time between invention and patent (unless a previous one had expired).

It's a patent for the shape of the guitar, not electric guitars themselves.

The dog watch that keeps time at 7x normal speed.

I just added it to the page :)

I'm a little taken aback that a Government institution like NASA would even file patents and discourage open innovation. Does anybody know the reasons why they file patents? Are NASA's patents enforced and have they collected royalties?

It's probably a defensive patent so someone can't sue NASA for using their own intellectual property.

I know very little about the topic, but is that a thing? Surely just publishing (without asserting ownership) could establish prior art?

In theory, yes. In practice, patent examiners mostly only look at patents when checking for prior art. Once someone else gets a patent for your invention you'll face a costly legal process to invalidate the bogus patent.

While that may be true for generically publishing the work online, there are dedicated disclosure journals that are included in prior art searches by patent examiners. If you want to publish as an alternative to patenting, this is where you do it.

Any sufficiently large organization tends to become host to a population of defensive lawyers, which then produces patents as a side effect of building themselves a nest out of legal documents. Isn't nature beautiful?

"My reckons" are not generally reliable when it comes to law.

Having a patent doesn't grant you the right to use it (for example if someone else owns a patent for a similar technology you still have to make sure you aren't infringing that one). Defensive patenting only means that you have your own patents to assert against someone else who might potentially sue you.

I've heard the point of view expressed before that the number of patents filed per research dollar expended is a measure some large organizations like to use to judge the effectiveness of their research departments. Because the government doesn't have a profit/loss things like patents filed can be a way for them to compare their effectiveness to private industry.

That is a truly terrible metric for government entities. It's easy to get arbitrarily many patents if you don't care how worthless they are. The primary difficulty of getting a patent is not inventing something (which all engineers do continuously in the course of their jobs), it's the staggering amount of bureaucracy and paperwork required to propagate it through the patent office.

Which when the patentee is another government agency means the government is paying a whole slew of bureaucrats to do battle with each other time and again in order to generate a meaningless metric that only actually measures how much time they've wasted fabricating that metric.

Here is a very similar question on patents.stackexchange.com: http://patents.stackexchange.com/questions/9994/are-patents-...

Basically, if there's a significant cost to entry, and if the idea were open to anyone, it would discourage anyone from using the patent. With patent licensing there's a barrier to entry that gives a measure of exclusivity that is an additional motivation to anyone taking the idea to market.

I'm not really sure that I agree that governments should own and selectively sell ideas, even if for a short time but I can see the logic in that argument.

I talked to a government researcher recently who expressed this exact opinion. Ultimately, contractors are the one who build things for the government, whether it's a space shuttle or an aircraft carrier. Patents can provide an incentive for contractors to invest in certain areas by ensuring a measure of exclusivity.

There's something perverse in this -- something like, legal impediments to competition are so much the norm that only a loser would want a business without one? If that is the holdup then couldn't we try to reduce this systemic problem instead of adding to it?

(I know, a comment like this is probably from dreamland, but I'd like to keep a vacation house there while I can.)

The systematic problem is that if there's something expensive and anyone can want in, and the profit margins aren't clearly good, it's too risky to blow all your money on something and maybe not get a return. Maybe the market can fund one entrant but if there are two, and the market share is divided, there's not enough money for each player to cover their costs.

A systematic fix would look like one of:

    - Restrict entry to a single player (patents)
    - Provide matching funds for each sale

These fixes apply to this specific situation. We're talking about the space program, so we're talking large up-front capital costs, which means its possible the situation exists. The patent system is clearly cheaper up front, though the more expensive second option ensures at least some competition, making for an overall better product, but at a very high price.

That argument (for patents) works just as well as an argument for many other policies that allows a business to exclude competitors from a costly-to-enter market.

For example, in 1993 when it became apparent that the web was going to become important, it would have been beneficial for the government -- at least according to the argument you describe -- to auction off the right to develop and distribute web browsers since that would have motivated the winners of the auction to incur the costs to develop a really good web browser.

The development of a web browser is after all a significant expense: Mozilla, Google, Apple and Microsoft each sink 100s of millions of dollars a year into their web browsers.

I wrote about this for the Observer a while back: http://observer.com/2015/06/you-too-can-build-a-business-on-...

1) They can encourage innovation in house by letting their own engineers share in licensing fees 2) They give a lot of stuff away 3) They go out of their way to get people to use their inventions in ways that are good for everyone concerned.

I'm a little rusty on the topic since this was a few months ago, but they made a pretty good argument that their measured approach is in the public interest.

Thank God. I can finally get started on my clone.

The important thing isn't that you can now build a clone (it was scrapped for good reason: satellite retrieval never picked up and there are cheaper ways to get things into space and people in and out of space) but that the technology used in it is now free to use in your new spaceship. Boeing can't come by and say "sorry, you can't do that, patented" because you can point to NASAs patent for prior art. You don't even need to mess with getting NASA approval to use their patented system because the patent has expired.

This is the system working as designed: novel stuff gets patented and written down, temporary monopoly, then the patent expires and others can use it. It works less well when non-novel stuff gets patented, or when the industry moves so fast that the expiration term is disproportionately long, or when copyright gets extended and never expires.

Also, von Pragenau's obituary (he died a few months before the Wired article was published, apparently): http://www.hamptoncovefuneralhome.com/fh/obituaries/obituary...

Not related per se but for that reason all the more interesting. The Wired article refers to a different 1984 patent grant for another Pragenau invention which, had it been utilized by NASA, would have prevented the Challenger accident. It seems Pragenau is an un[der]sung hero.

The technology used in the space shuttle is way out of date. IN order to build a new space shuttle one would have to retrofit it with modern technology that is backwards compatible to the signals the old technology used in the shuttle to operate things.

For example use a Raspberry PI with an emulator for the old system that the space shuttle used and wire it into the old ports the shuttle uses for connections.

You'd have a lighter shuttle that doesn't need as much fuel, but the cost of writing the emulator would be a lot of money. You'd have to reverse engineer the technology in a working shuttle.

NASA let this patent expire because it is old technology they aren't using anymore.

In modern times there are a few companies building their own rockets that are more economical than building a shuttle.

Much as I'd like to see shuttle clones, I remember it had issues that caused at least two shuttles to explode and get destroyed. In making a shuttle clone you'd have to fix the o-ring and loose tiles thing.

Everyone hates how patents are abused, and yet everyone seems to acknowledge their importance in specific cases. Why not raise the price of patents substantially? It might make patent trolling economically unfeasible, but would still allow for someone to patent the cure the cancer or whatnot?

> everyone seems to acknowledge their importance in specific cases

Up until now? Sure. Maybe.

Going forward into the internet age? I don't acknowledge their importance to anyone but the already wealthy and connected.

The abuse of patents is largely a problem because it allows the established players to profit while making it hard for independent inventors to get a start.

Raising the cost to file a patent is only going to make that worse. It's already at the point of being too expensive to get a patent without some sort of funding.

> Why not raise the price of patents substantially?

Because it is not only rich people that are innovative? As far as I can see, if anyone is going to have their IP secured by the state, then money should not be the barrier to entry.

You could argue that if an idea is good enough, the inventor should be able to secure funding to get the patent. However, there is frequently an issue of timing with these things -- one needs to secure the idea as soon as possible. See the story of the two patent filings for the telephone.

Besides, patent trolling is popular because it is extremely profitable. Doubling or tripling the cost of patents will not deter any serious troll.

Anyone else find it odd the shuttle is pointing downwards on the page?

What could be the reason for this?

I understand that the document is intended to have a landscape orientation. Even if they had the image already prepared, why would they not have mirrored it left to right (and then added the numerical call-outs) so that a portrait orientation of the page would have left the ship facing towards the top of the page?

I'm reading too much into this.

Why would NASA bother patenting something like this? It's not like USSR would observe the patent and not copy.

Indeed. The fact that NASA chose to patent it seems to be evidence that patents are not used to protect innovation (of sensitive technologies at least). If it was innovative, they would have probably kept it secret as a matter of national security.

Bah, it was invalid anyway. The USSR had prior art from the Buran.

You might have the order backwards. :) The Buran was a direct reaction to the Shuttle program, and it did not fly until 13 years after this patent was granted.

And I get downvoted for a bad joke about Soviet technological espionage! You guys either have a much better sense of humour than me, or a much worse one. :-)

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