US Patent Issued to Space Exploration Technologies on Oct. 27 for "Spacecraft stack assembly and method for stacking, securing, and releasing spacecraft" (California, Washington, Connecticut Inventors)

ALEXANDRIA, Va., Oct. 27 -- United States Patent no. 12,774,115, issued on Oct. 27, was assigned to Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (Starbase, Texas).

"Spacecraft stack assembly and method for stacking, securing, and releasing spacecraft" was invented by Andrew C. Thompson (Hebron, Conn.), Patrick Sodt (Anaheim, Calif.), Thomas Tarlton (Los Angeles), Robert S. Tarlton (Playa Vista, Calif.), Solomon Westerman (Redmond, Wash.) and Michael Dergance (Hermosa Beach, Calif.).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "A method of deploying a plurality of spacecraft includes coupling the plurality of spacecraft in a stack to a payload adaptor, the stack extending along a longitudinal axis; launching the payl...