(Henry Spencer) wrote:

The bad news is that all those people have been working on it for several
years now, and progress is slow.

It's a good cooling-off exercise to go back and look at some of the
breathless articles from the 1960s, soon after the first findings on
the strength of carbon fibers/whiskers. We were supposed to have the
Gibraltar Bridge and the mass-produced 200-pound car chassis well
before this. Yet carbon fiber is still a relatively low-volume niche
engineering material, cranky and labor-intensive to work with.

CNTs are stronger still. But even if synthesis challenges are
overcome, there are plenty of process-engineering challenges on the
way to an affordable bulk engineering material.

Monte Davis
http://montedavis.livejournal.com