Notice that the vast majority of his patents have to do with various aspects of "active injury mitigation technology", primarily related to saws, and that the most recent one was filed in August 2021. The only patent being offered up is the original--- Patent 9,724,840--- which basically only releases a very specific, early implementation of the safety system that has since undergone 20 years of additional patent activity.
>Gass also has a PhD in physics and was the person who designed and engineered the product.
So what? That doesn't make him NOT an attorney. There's nothing that says a PhD and product inventor can't ALSO be a engaged in a scheme to have their own patent encumbered invention mandated by law.
Airbus is a threat, but they have a huge obstacle Boeing doesn't: they don't build planes in the US except for the A319-320-321. Any defense contract won with an Airbus airframe as its basis (e.g. NG's KC-X submission based on the Airbus A330 MRTT) also includes the expense and possible difficulty building a factory in the US to manufacture them. Boeing may have a bad reputation for screwing up manufacturing, but that's a known quantity vs. the giant question mark that is the quality of a theoretical Airbus factory--- run by a US defense contractor rather than Airbus--- that hasn't been built.
That far north is definitely outside the central valley. Once you travel north out of Redding, you're climbing up into the mountains, and it's 60 miles of that before you get to Shasta. Lassen is better candidate, since it actually erupted recently (1921) and is only ~40 miles east of Redding... but it's also part of the Cascade range like Shasta, which sn't really IN the valley.
SpaceX will never have an IPO because being publicly traded means ceding a certain degree of control. The founders' goal is to make life multiplanetary, and the typical goal of rando shareholders is to pump up the stock price. They don't want to have to deal with the latter.
They may at some point spin off Starlink and IPO that, but not until it's fully deployed and not heavily dependent on frequent, super cheap, low bureaucratic friction launch services from SpaceX.
https://patents.justia.com/inventor/stephen-f-gass
Notice that the vast majority of his patents have to do with various aspects of "active injury mitigation technology", primarily related to saws, and that the most recent one was filed in August 2021. The only patent being offered up is the original--- Patent 9,724,840--- which basically only releases a very specific, early implementation of the safety system that has since undergone 20 years of additional patent activity.