Raytheon-GE Patent Fight Hinges on NASA’s ‘Aspirational Engine’

A Federal Circuit judge grappled with whether the patent office properly used a reference requiring “dreamlike advanced materials” to knock out Raytheon Technologies Corp.'s airplane engine patent, during oral argument in an appeal of an agency invalidation decision.

Judge Raymond T. Chen pressed patent challenger General Electric Co.‘s attorney on whether the prior art discussed “a futuristic, aspirational engine that did not exist then, and could not exist then, because the so-called advanced materials did not exist at that time, and they still do not exist.” The prior art, a NASA technical memorandum, disclosed “something almost like a science ...