Appeal No. 1999-1773
Application No. 08/497,858
to understand how to make and use the invention with or without the cited background
information. Appellants filed a declaration by one of the co-inventors to this effect.
Appellants argue that the examiner has never explained why he does not understand the
invention nor has the examiner explained why the statements of the declaration were not
true.
We agree with appellants on this point. The examiner has not satisfied his burden
of establishing that undue experimentation would be required. One must first identify who
the person skilled in the relevant art is. It turns out that in order to understand the claimed
invention, you actually do have to be a rocket scientist. Thus, this application is directed to
people who are skilled in the art of launching and controlling satellites, that is, rocket
scientists. We have no doubt that rocket scientists are familiar with the fact that satellites
contain nutation compensators which operate according to some polynomial transfer
function. All controls can be formulated as transfer functions. We do not understand why
the examiner questions how the transfer function was derived or what the variables mean.
The transfer function is written in the form of the Laplace Transform, which is conventionally
used in the control art. The examiner has failed to convince us that it would require undue
experimentation to reset one of the states of the polynomial to produce an equal and
opposite transient to damp out the transient due to roll unload.
We also find that the examiner has failed to give proper consideration to the
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