It wasn’t like we could hold him in breach of contract or something

That sort of points to the nature of the problem, doesn’t it? The world relied on Musk’s sense of charity for MONTHS and did nothing to either pay for or substitute Starlink.

I mean, just saying it out loud, “Musk’s sense of charity”, should cause the kind of vomit into one’s own mouth that immediately merits attention and forces one ask, “What the hell did I swallow?”

Who is working to give Ukraine an alternative to Starlink? Anyone? If not, then yeah, they handed the reins over to Musk and didn’t do jack squat to fix it. That’s not Musk’s failure.

Sure… but for every 1 of those examples, there are 100 or 1000 variants that showed astonishing properties in the laboratory that were never manufactured at scale due to cost or other undesirable material characteristics.

Lead apatite may turn out to be an important step, or maybe not. When Paul Chu made the first big breakthrough with yttrium/barium superconductors at liquid nitrogen temps, everybody thought that workable room temperature superconductors were right around the corner. That was almost 40 years ago. As of right now, we don’t know whether “room temperature superconductivity at scale” is 1 year or 1 century away. It’s closer, probably? That’s about all we can guess.

There are about a zillion ways it could prove to be impractical. Apatite is a crystal, and presumably this lead apatite is also a crystal. We also don’t know if it can be deposited in a useful thickness; the samples tested so far were created by gas deposition on glass. Can it be built up to a useful thickness, and maintain its superconducting properties? All unknown.

But, real progress always comes in small steps. It’s exceedingly rare for any discovery to result in a useful product immediately.

If would be one hell of an error, if so, to get measurements across several different properties and temperature ranges that were all consistent with superconductivity.

But even if true, we can make lots of things in very small quantities in laboratories that are far too expensive for practical manufacture. That’s where engineering will come in.