Scope and limits

This is an absence in ONE document, a UK patent application filed in 2017 and published in 2018. The patent was later granted, and the granted text was published in 2021. Its 50 claims were read and hold no such language either. Its description was searched only in a machine-read copy of the page images, which holds none of these words (no form of encrypt, authenticate, cipher, crypto, spoof, codeword, secure or jam, and no "spread spectrum", on any of its 42 pages, while "pilot beam" is found 7 times on 6 pages); machine reading can miss a word, so that part of the search is weaker. It is not evidence that no authentication is stated anywhere, and it is not evidence about what Space Solar's current design does. Later filings, company material and the CASSIE papers were not covered by this reading. A patent application is a poor place to look for a security control in any case: security measures are routinely omitted from patents because disclosing them is against the applicant's interest and they rarely contribute to patentability. An absence here is weak evidence of absence in the design. The notes count of "encoding" is understated: the stem "encod" occurs twelve times on seven pages (PDF 1, 19, 24, 33, 34, 38 and 41), in the description and on the front page as well as at claims 23 and 43, all communications modulation and none security (VER-1344 CONFIRMED 2026-09-19). A coded pilot was in the US reference design, as NASA's 1981 RP-1076 records: RP-1076 (SRC-107), printed p.63 (PDF p.92), read for CLM-0160 on 2026-09-19, states that the existing baseline phase control system includes "a method of coding each SPS pilot signal" against "an intentional dephasing attempt or an attempt to redirect (rob) power" and describes "a coded (secure) pilot signal and ground sensors for additional safing"; the absence found here is in this patent application, not in the literature. RP-1076 also gives the preliminary design of the code developed by then: a split-phase, direct-sequence pseudonoise code, modulo-2 added to optional command data, that biphase-modulates the 2450 MHz pilot carrier (printed p.69, PDF p.98), with a 12-stage maximal-length shift-register sequence of period 4095 recommended as the spread-spectrum code (printed p.79, PDF p.108). The review panel report of a January 1980 workshop, bound into RP-1076 as an appendix, found that "not enough attention has been paid to the problem of security and antijamming" and asked for "State-of-the-art cryptography" from the outset (printed p.238, PDF p.267). None of these pages describes a check by which the satellite could tell a forged pilot from a real one.