WHAT IS UNOBTAINIUM?
In the 2009
film, Avatar, the events of the film are set in motion
by the desire to acquire a rare mineral of unfathomable value known
simply as “unobtainium”. The unimaginative, seemingly lazy naming of this mysterious
substance drew the ire and scorn of several critics, many of whom seemed
blissfully unaware that aeronautical engineers and scientists have been talking
about unobtainium since the 1950s. So what is unobtainium and who named
it?
Although it isn’t
clear who first coined the term “unobtainium”, the first known documented case
of it appeared in the February 27, 1956 edition of the Marshall, Michigan Evening
Chronicle where it stated, “The metal is so hard to come by
that the scientists have devised a lugubriously-humorous name for it. They call
it ‘unobtainium.'”
The next known
documented instance occurred in the 1957 Ohio based newspaper, The
Zanesville Signal. In it, Major General William O. Senter,
the chief of procurement and production at Wright-Patterson Air Force
Base, explained that the Air Force was currently
looking for a virtually weightless material that was simultaneously “infinitely
strong” and easy to work with. Senter went on to explain that this
wonder material also needed to be able to “resist any degree of heat” while being “available
at negligible cost”. The Major General then jokingly added that
although the Air Force had yet to find such a substance, they did have a name
for it- “unobtainium“.
Just one year
later, in 1958, unobtainium was officially defined by the Interim
Glossary of Aero Space Terms as a noun that refers to:
“A substance having the exact
high test properties required for a piece of hardware or other item of use, but
not obtainable either because it theoretically cannot exist or because
technology is insufficiently advanced to produce it.”
In that glossary, and all subsequent reproductions of it,
the word is listed as being “humorous or ironical”, a sort of
inside-joke amongst engineers and scientists. However, just because the word is
often used jokingly doesn’t mean it doesn’t have a useful place in the world of
science as a shorthand way of talking about a material that possesses the exact
set of properties you need for a given project, but for whatever reason you
either can’t get a hold of the substance or it simply doesn’t exist yet. In the
latter case, it certainly is slightly more professional sounding than using
something like the word “thingy” when drawing up specs and discussing design
elements.
But even when the substance already has a name and very
much does exist, “unobtainium” is still sometimes used. For example, during the
Cold War, titanium was sometimes referred to by U.S. engineers as unobtainium
due to its various properties being perfect for many aerospace applications,
but almost nobody in the States could get their hands on any real quantity of
it due to the Soviet Union controlling most of the world’s supply at the time.
An example where
the unobtainium simply didn’t exist yet was with the Rockwell X-30, a
proposed hypersonic aircraft from the 1990s that was conceived as a “passenger
space liner” capable of travelling perhaps as high as Mach 25. For much of
the craft’s initial development, many engineers dismissed the possibility of
such a craft existing, stating that it would need to be constructed out of
unobtainium to have the necessary weight, strength, and durability
requirements, while also able to survive continually oscillating between low
temperatures and then being exposed to several thousand degrees Fahrenheit as
it traveled at ultra high speeds. However, shortly before funding for the X-30
was cut (mostly due to budget concerns), this particular “unobtainium” was
created in the form of a carbon-carbon composite covered with a silicon-carbide
ceramic coating. According to an interview with Dr. Terry Ronald, the deputy director of materials for
the project, this substance addressed many of the problems detractors had
pointed out years prior.
For a more
contemporary example, consider the Integrated Science Instrument Module, part of
the James
Webb Space Telescope project due
to launch in 2018 if there are no further delays. The ISIM also made use of
something referred to as unobtainium, in the form of a needed material that
hadn’t been invented yet when the telescope was initially being
designed. NASA later described this design process as being like: “building a car chassis without a blueprint or even a list of recommended
construction materials.” However, they came up with a solution in the end,
creating a “never-before-manufactured composite material” capable of surviving “temperatures that plunged as low as 27 Kelvin (-411 degrees Fahrenheit),
colder than the surface of Pluto.”
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