Now imagine some key technology that appears to be "less important" and with "smaller budget". It will never come back; it will be lost foever.
Modern technological society is always less than a generation away from "losing the recipe" for any given critical but ignored technology. I saw this at HP and it can be as quick as 2-5 years in some cases.
And this applies to outsourced technology infrastructure - once outsourced, you can NOT just flip a switch to bring it back - it will take 20-50 years to bring it back and only if you fund continuously (not continually).
the supposedly forgotten component is made of a proprietary polystyrene resin, and the physical form is also important the density must be varied along the axis of the hohlraum [reflector cavity] resulting in modulation of fission derived neutron velocity and energy to a magnitude resulting in the initiation of the fusion components.
My dad worked at Boeing and related companies for decades.
Lots of manufacturing steps had odd things that had zero documentation. Lot of protectionism for job security. Others just laziness.
One he mentioned was using fishing line to help foam set correctly. When replacements tried to build the part it just wouldn’t work right. They had no idea why.
Now imagine some key technology that appears to be "less important" and with "smaller budget". It will never come back; it will be lost foever.
Modern technological society is always less than a generation away from "losing the recipe" for any given critical but ignored technology. I saw this at HP and it can be as quick as 2-5 years in some cases.
And this applies to outsourced technology infrastructure - once outsourced, you can NOT just flip a switch to bring it back - it will take 20-50 years to bring it back and only if you fund continuously (not continually).