One Last Transmission From Satellite Old-Timers : Aerospace: Hughes Aircraft won a $114-million patent judgment. But China Lake pioneers say Navy employees got there first.

They were young and ambitious scientists in 1958, working at a remote government laboratory on rocket technology crucial to national security. To this day, their intellectual pride in the work is undimmed.

So when Hughes Aircraft won a $114-million judgment against the U.S. government for patent infringement in June--the largest patent award against taxpayers in history--it reignited the passion of these Navy scientists who assert that they were the real technology pioneers and that Hughes absconded with their glory.

Retired now, some in declining health, they want one last chance to set the record straight about what they accomplished at their secretive outpost in the Mojave Desert more than three decades ago.

“It is silly that the government has to pay for something we invented in the first place,” said Frank Cartright, former deputy technical director at the China Lake Naval Weapons Center. “The old-timers around here are not big Hughes admirers.”

At issue is who created the know-how to build the first communications satellite, a development that revolutionized worldwide data, television and telephone links and spurred the creation of a $2-billion manufacturing industry that Hughes dominates.

The patent dispute has been fought in federal courtrooms for two decades, waged by several powerful law firms hired by Hughes and a reticent staff of attorneys at the Department of Justice. The court has repeatedly upheld the validity of Hughes’ claims.

The case has turned on arcane legal issues. Patent awards often have more to do with the legal quality of a patent than on the intellectual value of a scientist’s work.

But the protests of the retired scientists, who say they have new evidence, represent a bizarre twist in the dispute.

The disagreement revolves around two late titans of Cold War technology: Bill McLean, top scientist at China Lake and the inventor of the Sidewinder missile, still the most widely used air-to-air missile after 40 years, and Donald Williams, a brilliant but troubled Hughes scientist whose name is carried on the Hughes satellite patent.

McLean died in 1976 with nearly 300 patents to his name. Among them was a concept for controlling the trajectory of a spinning rocket by using timed pulses from a small rocket motor, magnet or pressurized gas jet--a principle known as precession that was used on the Sidewinder.

Williams, who killed himself in 1966, devised a way of controlling the attitude, or orientation relative to a plane, of a satellite with precession--an application of the concept that a U.S. Claims Court judge ruled was not obvious from McLean’s prior work and deserved a separate patent.

After years of legal sparring and the filing of thousands of documents in the case, it had seemed that all the facts were on the table. In June, Judge James T. Turner handed down the $114-million judgment, finally putting a value on Hughes’ alleged loss.

But now, half a dozen current and former government officials who worked at the China Lake Naval Weapons Center during the late 1950s have important new evidence, they claim in interviews with The Times. Though they are not pressing their case in court, they insist the China Lake center beat Hughes to the punch, building a series of secret spacecraft that used the same technology Hughes claimed as its own in a patent filed in 1960.

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The story actually begins in 1958, when the United States launched with great fanfare Explorer I, the official answer to the Soviet Union’s launch of the Sputnik satellite in 1957.

But without any public announcement, the Navy launched two other satellites into orbit just after Explorer I, according to John Nicolaides, who was technical chief of the Navy’s space program. The three-stage rocket, named Notsnick, was launched from the underbelly of a Navy jet fighter.

The success of the rocket was never disclosed, on direct orders from the Eisenhower White House, Nicolaides said. “It was not announced, as agreed upon by myself and the White House,” he said. “I am saying that it did enter orbit now for the first time.”

Nicolaides, 71, is retired in San Luis Obispo. After his Navy work, he rose to senior jobs at NASA and later chaired the aerospace engineering department at Notre Dame University and California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo. He eventually won a patent of his own for inventing the parafoil--a parachute that resembles a wing and allows its user to maneuver precisely during a descent to Earth.

Ultimately, the Navy hoped to use the Notsnick rocket to launch a reconnaissance satellite and an anti-satellite satellite, using the same type of precession as Hughes outlined in its later patent application, according to Nicolaides. Though the devices were not sent into orbit, they were built and tested at China Lake between 1958 and 1960, he said.

Leo L. Keilman, a retired China Lake engineer, said he built the anti-satellite model himself in about 1958. It was prepared for launch at a Pacific Ocean test range but was destroyed by an explosion in the rocket motor; no physical evidence of the device exists today, he said.

“It nearly landed on my head,” Keilman recalled, referring to the wreckage raining from the sky.

In addition, a program to build a spacecraft, using jet pulses for control, was developed at China Lake starting in 1958 to photograph the back side of the moon, according to former Navy scientist Gordon McCarty, now retired and living in Diamond Bar.

Leroy Doig, a Navy historian at China Lake, said his research confirms the accounts by Nicolaides and the others, although formal reports, blueprints and drawings of the devices cannot be found.

“A lot of stuff here wasn’t documented well or the documents were packed off to a federal documents center” and lost, Doig said.

In part, the lack of formal evidence is attributable to McLean’s own style of encouraging quick, informal projects to push technology. In some cases, McLean built Navy hardware in his own garage workshop.

Doig said the resentment over the Hughes award is prompted by the strong pride the China Lake scientists had in their achievements.

Shunning higher-paying jobs in Los Angeles, they went to China Lake in the ‘50s out of an old-fashioned belief in their country and for the leading-edge work McLean was doing, Doig said. “They called this place the Secret City,” he recalled.

Cartwright said that while Williams deserves a lot of credit for his work at Hughes, much of the same technology was developed at China Lake. “There is a lot of personal emotion between what we did and what they did,” Cartwright said. “It is scratching an old wound.”

Nicolaides believes that Williams and other Hughes engineers borrowed liberally from the China Lake work of McLean, McCarty and Keilman. Hughes officials were frequent visitors to China Lake, he said.

Indeed, Williams asked China Lake officials for a special gimbal--a type of bearing--that McLean had invented for the Sidewinder, which Williams then used in building a demonstration model for his satellite controller, Nicolaides said.

“Nobody knows whether Williams talked directly to my dad,” said McLean’s son, Donald. “It is a strong possibility that Williams picked up some of his technology by going up to China Lake in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s.”

In fact, McLean was close friends with Allen E. Puckett, a Hughes scientist who would later become chairman of Hughes Aircraft. McLean even entered a business deal with Hughes in the 1960s, but the deal went sour and McLean ended up in a long and unsuccessful court fight against Hughes.

Walter Finch, a Baltimore attorney who represented the McLean family, said McLean’s technical work “should be worth hundreds of millions of dollars.” The family has received only modest royalties for commercial applications of his work.

Victor Savikas, the patent attorney who has long represented Hughes, said he could not recall any evidence involving a secret rocket program at China Lake. But he recalled that when the government submitted a technical article that described one spacecraft project at China Lake, the judge ruled in the 1970s that it did not diminish the validity of the Hughes patent.

Savikas added that the secret program was not likely to have a bearing on Hughes’ patent, because an anti-satellite device would have been different from a geosynchronous communications satellite and probably would not be controlled by ground commands, a crucial distinction in the Hughes patent, he said.

Nicolaides, however, responded that the Justice Department never fully researched or documented in court the scope of the work at China Lake that preceded the Williams patent filing. Thomas J. Byrne, the lawyer representing the government, has declined requests for interviews for years.

Ironically, Hughes had hoped that the patent case might be worth $1 billion and was disappointed in the $114-million award by Claims Court Judge Turner. The firm is appealing the decision, Savikas said.

While McLean is held in high esteem by Navy scientists, Williams has the same hold on the retired Hughes scientists who worked at his side in the early ‘60s.

“He built the original device in his garage,” said Murray Neufeld, who worked under Williams. “There is very little question in my mind that it spawned the whole satellite business. It is a tribute to Don Williams. I didn’t realize how privileged I was until it was all over.”

In 1966, Williams, apparently distraught over marital difficulties, shot himself with the service revolver owned by his wife, a Los Angeles police officer. His body was discovered in the bathtub of his apartment.

“It was a really big blow to everybody,” said Boris Subottin, a retired Hughes scientist who worked with Williams. “It was a very small group of guys who were doing this whole business.”

If not for the huge stakes in the lawsuit, the work done by Williams and McLean would likely be long forgotten, much as engineers are seldom recognized for their work even when it changes the course of history.

“All he thought about was doing something for his country,” said LaV McLean, McLean’s widow. “He wasn’t in it for the money--his top salary was $38,000 a year.”