Your patent has to fully describe how the invention works. And if it doesn't work at all, then who cares if you own a patent for it, it's a useless invention an

Your patent has to fully describe how the invention works. And if it doesn't work at all, then who cares if you own a patent for it, it's a useless invention anyway. If your rocket does work, then yes being able to lock everyone else out of it for decades is the entire point. But once those decades are over, anyone else can copy your idea, which has been documented for all of eternity. There's an almost endless list of inventions before patents that were never made public, and nobody knows how they worked. Unfortunately, that's the idea for how patents are supposed to work. In the real world what we have is patent trolls.