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Comment by syncsynchalt | Hacker News Reader

It's not about the delay, they can take as long as they want to build what they want to build. I object to their attempt to use patents to block competitors for decades when they didn't even have a product yet.

Fortunately it was challenged and the USPTO invalidated patent 8,678,321: https://cdn.geekwire.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/2015-08-...

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ah, yeah, patent trolling is pretty horrible (and Bezos is known for this - one click)...

... although, just to play a little devil's advocate, Bezos doesn't get enough credit for jump starting private spaceflight companies. Blue Origin was started 2 years before SpaceX. Am sure Blue Origin racked up a ton of patents.

Your devils advocate paragraph seems to contradict itself.

Unless you mean to say spaceX somehow benefited from the patents blue origin filed previously. I don't see how that would be the case though.

yeah, didn't state it clearly. only meant that Blue Origin has actually been at it longer than SpaceX, and probably has around the same amount of patents as them because of it. Yeah, Blue Origin doesn't get as much credit for commercial space flight as spacex, and rightful so, but seems like they still did contribute a great deal (in fact, Blue Origin was the first to complete a vertical takeoff and landing, although it was with a suborbital vehicle).

Do you know about Northrop Grumman Lunar Landing Challenge and Delta Clipper?

True, a lot of rockets have done vert take off and landing.

Do you know about XCOR and Andrew Beal?

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