How far ahead is the USA .., page 2

Originally posted by St Udio

Originally posted by Infoholic
Possibly what you are referring to is the Military/Government.

....., we're about 10 - 20 years behind what the Military/Government have on hand. But that doesn't mean everything they still have under lock and key really works, though.

that 10-20 year window is probably a conservative number...

WOGIT, here's a pdf file from 1968, from a monthly meeting/discussion/reporting session
"IEEE Transactions on Electron Devices, October 1968"
@ the White Sands Missile Range facility

the link: ieeexplore.ieee.org...

some of the entries and descriptions of work then, already. underway;

various exotic metal batteries
fuel cell systems,
solar energy,
space based solar powered energy transmitters,
exotic thermal micro-thin layers of foil,
space power systems producing electric propulsion,
implantable Rankine-Cycle engine,
implantable artifical heart...using plutonium 238
implantable Sterling engine to power devices including heart pumps,
Deep-Ocean Electrical Power Systems, for up to 2,000 deep, 10,000KW, +3 year operation, available before the 1980 needs & requirements !

~and lots more unique technology things being developed, refined~

scan these things over, compare to when commercial stuff became available, & even try to conceive just what has the gov't got on the deep-ocean floor that will need 10,000KWs of electricity and have a useful life of +3 years before an overhaul

1. Everything in the article really is 1960s technology. It's not like any of that stuff was ahead of the capabilities of the commercial sector at the time; It's just that many of those things are expensive while not being useful enough for a company to expect to turn a profit on, especially when the technologies aren't mature. The government only appears more advanced because it has the money to afford the state-of-the-art (even if it's all borrowed)

Plutonium-powered pacemakers were actually pretty common around that time; I bet they never got around to making a plutonium powered artificial heart, after they realized how little medical science knew about making artificial hearts in general at the time.

Electric thrusters in space were really new in 68, but IEEE being what it is, seems to have quickly recognized that the chief problem was the power source, something that still hasn't been worked out very well to this very day. The article was probably mostly on RTGs, solar cells, and maybe some sort of hypothetical very light closed-cycle nuclear reactor, just like today. Really, the only thing that's changed is that the thermocouples are better in the RTGs today, solar cells are a bit more efficient, and lightweight closed cycle nuclear reactors are even more politically infeasable.

2. As for the deep-sea powerplant, it's probably for a nuclear submarine. They seem to fit the bill perfectly. They operate for months at a time deep under the ocean, with years between refueling, and can easily need at least 10MW. Nuclear submarines were already deployed at the time; the requirement was probably for a future sub generation.