Lead with the time scale, because it reframes the problem. An all-electric satellite raising itself to geostationary orbit does not do it in a fiery few minutes; it spirals up over weeks or months of gentle thrust. Over that span, power availability, eclipse seasons, and thruster behavior all change, and managing the engine through it is a sustained operations problem, not a single burn.
Boeing's grant US11401053B2 (inventors Sadek W. Mansour, Jeffrey Scott Noel, and Rainier Pio Roda), classified in B64G 1/007 and B64G 1/405 (electric propulsion) with battery and power-management codes including H02J 7/00 and B60L 58/14, claims autonomous control of the electrical power feeding the thruster during that climb.
The mechanism is closed-loop power management. The system decides how much power to route to the thrusters as solar input and battery state vary through the orbit-raising campaign, optimizing the climb without requiring ground operators to make every adjustment. The CPC blend of spacecraft and battery-management codes shows it is genuinely an electrical-systems patent, not just a propulsion one.
Economically, autonomy on orbit-raising matters because that months-long spiral is dead time, the satellite earns nothing until it arrives, and ground-operations labor over weeks is expensive. Automating the power management shortens the path to revenue and cuts the staffing burden of the transit.
Read with the rest of the 2022 electric-propulsion cluster, from MIT's thruster staging to Caltech's converter electronics, it confirms the theme: electric propulsion's frontier had shifted from can-we-build-the-thruster to can-we-operate-it-efficiently-and-autonomously. The patent is a marker of that maturation, with the field performance, as always, settled on orbit rather than in the claim.