People are often making exciting new discoveries with exotic materials that can change everything. To some extent that's why NASA and others are looking at nanotechnology (a fancy word for carbon molecule constructs). However with many of these new materials there's a "gotcha". It wouldn't surprise me that there are thermoelectric materials with 18% or better efficiency that crap out after five years of use because they're sensitive to cosmic radiation or thermal gradients (this happened with a haffnium diboride thermal protection material). Getting a new material into space is hard. Normally you have to fly it on a prototype satellite (DS/1) with lots of other funky hardware before anyone will risk using it on something more important. There's a wonderful thermoprotection material called SIRCA that they have been trying to get on the front end of Mars aeroshells. However the older SLA-561V works just fine (it's very expensive and proprietary to Lockheed-Martin). One is always bucking against the stupid argument: "Why fix it if it isn't broken?". I call this "the Tyranny of Success". The Tyranny of Success can kill innovation and lead to a technological stagnation.

Gary