With little inertia, friction or drag, the wheel can be spun up to speed in a trice, and then made to dump its rotational energy back into the car's transmission in seconds.
To make sure the transmission would make it back to Earth, the images sent back by the astronauts were recorded at 10 frames per second (fps), and had to be converted to 60fps in order to be broadcast.
The company would like to see a fraction of the credit go to utilities to compensate them for having to reserve space on their transmission systems and for having to run the back-up systems when the wind dies down.
The Japanese case dates back to 2011 when Samsung filed a claim that Apple had use one of its data transmission techniques without paying a licence fee.