Examples are rear cassettes in the mountain biking community, parts that are no longer available for old-car enthusiasts, parts for reel-to-reel audio-tape recorders, and rare vacuum tubes such as the 1L6 or WD-11 that can now cost more than the equipment in which they were fitted. It usually refers to a very high-end and desirable product. 'Unobtainium' has come to be used as a synonym for "unobtainable" among people who are neither science fiction fans nor engineers to denote an object that actually exists, but which is very hard to obtain either because of high price (sometimes referred to as "unaffordium") or limited availability. These are essential to the performance of consumer electronics and green technology, but the projected demand for them so outstrips their current supply that they are called "unobtainiums" within the ore industry and by commentators on the US Congressional hearings into the supply security of rare-earths. Contemporary popularization īy 2010, the term had diffused beyond engineering, and now can appear in the headlines of mainstream newspapers, especially to describe the commercially useful rare earth elements (particularly terbium, erbium, dysprosium, yttrium, and neodymium). Titanium allowed a higher strength-to-weight ratio at the high temperatures the Blackbird would reach, but its availability was restricted because the Soviet Union controlled its supply. For example, during the development of the SR-71 Blackbird spy plane, Lockheed engineers at the " Skunk Works" under Clarence "Kelly" Johnson used 'unobtainium' as a dysphemism for titanium. Later, 'unobtainium' became an engineering term for practical materials that really exist, but are difficult to get. Aerospace engineers are frequently tempted to design aircraft which require parts with strength or resilience beyond that of currently available materials. The word "unobtainium" may well have been coined in the aerospace industry to refer to materials capable of withstanding the extreme temperatures expected in re-entry. By the 1990s, the term was in wide use, even in formal engineering papers such as "Towards unobtainium. Since the late 1950s, aerospace engineers have used the term "unobtainium" when referring to unusual or costly materials, or when theoretically considering a material perfect for their needs in all respects, except that it does not exist. An alternate spelling, unobtanium, is sometimes used, perhaps based on the spelling of real elements like titanium and uranium. It predates the similar-sounding systematic element names, such as ununennium. The word " unobtainium" derives humorously from " unobtainable", with -ium, a suffix for chemical element names. The concept of unobtainium is often applied hand-wavingly, flippantly, or humorously. But for a nuclear rocket, unobtainium might have the needed qualities of lightness, strength at high temperatures, and resistance to radiation damage: A combination of all three qualities is impossible with today's materials. The properties of any particular example of unobtainium depend on the intended use (e.g., a pulley made of unobtainium might be massless and frictionless). Less commonly, it can mean a device with desirable engineering properties for an application that are exceedingly difficult or impossible to achieve. Unobtainium originally referred to materials that do not exist at all, but more recently, it has been used to describe real materials that are unavailable due to extreme rarity or cost. In fiction, engineering, and thought experiments, unobtainium is a material ideal for a particular application but impractically hard to get.
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