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Genuinely curious then: where do we actually excel?

The only examples I can think of right now where we are genuinely number one is high priced low volume boutique aerospace (SpaceX and other new space companies, satellites, experimental military aircraft, electric planes, etc.) and of course weapons.

We can manufacture decent cars, but at least half of this is under the direction and management of overseas companies like Toyota and Nissan. US car companies have been on the ropes for decades.

We seem to be losing the bulk of aerospace, generation turbines, electronics, chips, medical devices, power equipment, materials, ... ?

Seeing graphs like this makes me wonder if I am living in the late days of the USSR when I'm sure many optimistic graphs were published by Pravda.

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What? Turbines? Materials? Only the US and Europe can actually build functional jet engines and most of the bleeding edge materials. Even semi functional jet engines are still a distant dream for China. Same thing goes for chips, where only Taiwan and the US can manufacture current gen nodes. If anything, the US offloaded commodity manufacturing that is easily reproductible to build a very very high moat around key technologies instead of fighting to the bottom for scraps of old industries.

As for medical devices and tech, the US probably creates more new drugs and treatments than the rest of the world combined. when's the last time china, india or russia made a break through in medecine? When's the last time the US did? Last year?

> Same thing goes for chips, where only Taiwan and the US can manufacture current gen nodes.

This view is rampant throughout this thread and I keep wondering why South Korea is omitted. I thought SK semiconductor tech was comparable the US and Taiwan?

Sorry, yes south korea has an amazing industry. Japan too even if it's not the leader it used to be. but even then, last gen chip design is overwhelmingly coming from the US. Apple, AMD, Qualcomm and Intel have the most performant designs by far, so the moat is still definitely present. Taiwan and SK are arguably better in manufacturing the chips right now though I agree.

I remember that Fujitsu fabricated the SPARC processor, but what other semiconductors is Japan known for?

Pezy SC was kicking around top500 for a while, Sony domminates imaging sensors, likewise for sending niche medical and electrical stuff.

Kioxia (formerly Toshiba Memory) is large semiconductor for NAND chips, its fabs are in Japan.

Samsung's transistors are only slightly behind TSMC, SS8nm probably trades blows with intel 10nm and solidly beats 14+++. And their DRAM and NAND flash is the probably the best, so it is at least comparable.

But beyond SK I cannot think of any other countries with competitive fabs.

Also only a tangent but I really believe that deal where TSMC is going to put a N7 fab in the USA is either going to get restructured into something way smaller or never ever going to happen.

Sony dominates imaging sensors.

> when [was] the last time china, india or russia made a break through in [medicine]?

2015.

https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/2015/tu/facts/

(PS. This took less than 30 seconds to find and confirm).

Exactly my point. The USA has breakthroughs every years and very bleeding edge meds coming out every few months. 2015 is not recently at all, relatively speaking.

The prize was awarded for work done in the 1970s, fwiw.

(PS. This took me most of a minute of reading the link you provided).

Sure, any to answer the more general question in the OP:

Russia invented and built and then sold to the USA the RD-180 rocket engines that are used for the first stage of the American Atlas V launch vehicle.

Which the USA will no doubt "reverse engineer" soon :)

The OP needs to get out more often.

I feel weird playing the jingoism game, because it doesn't even vaguely reflect my feelings on the subject, but here we go:

SpaceX, a privately-held American company, is the only source of innovation in rocketry at the present time. Their reusable launch platform plays in its own league; everything else is steam power, Falcon is internal combustion.

That's just a fact. Unlike insisting that China, Russia, India are incapable of innovation more generally, which is risible.

My vague impression, in fact, is that jet turbines are quite a bit more difficult to manufacture than rocket engines, even if the latter are thought of as 'higher tech'.

I'm fairly certain we'll discover, in the next ten years, that China is quite capable of making cutting-edge computer chips, and just hadn't gotten around to it yet.

I've never shared my countrymen's obsession with insisting on being 'the greatest'. This country is great in its own right, along many dimensions; it is, in fact, right at the cutting edge for medicine and CPUs; denigrating the work of other nations only detracts from this.

> My vague impression, in fact, is that jet turbines are quite a bit more difficult to manufacture than rocket engines, even if the latter are thought of as 'higher tech'.

My impression is that “real” rocket engines include a jet engine just to pump fuel. They have many other pieces as well.

Not that a modern high-bypass turbofan is simple, but don’t discount the complexity of rocket science.

Jet engines will not be a distant dream for China for long, neither will chips. China has functional 14nm now and has been building their own EUV machines in expectation of the recent US moves.

It will be the same story for jet engines, Chinese improvement is very rapid. It was the same story for every rising power so far, there is no real reason that China will never be able to build a jet engine, and no reason that they will never be able to run a fab (and indeed, they are accelerating quite fast).

Chinese engine improvement has not been rapid by any measure. China still has to import the majority of high performance fighter engines from Russia (primarily the AL-31). China has been trying to develop the WS-15 as a replacement for almost 30 years, and still relies upon the AL-31 for their premier stealth fighter (J-20).

They have started to deploy the WS-10 Taihang engine for their J-10 fighter, but the performance of this engine is markedly worse than comparable Western engines. Military grade engines are hard!

Jet engines are indeed hard. But with the upcoming tech transfer from Ukraine as well as the slow but steady improvement of the WS-15, I would be incredibly surprised if it took more than 6 years for the WS-15 program to yield a serviceable engine.

Even the US relied on foreign jet engines for a time, although you won't hear about it a lot - for example, an absolutely huge amount of engineers were hired from AVRO in Canada after the development of the superior Iroquois engine (which had by quite a margin the highest nominal thrust as well as the highest) as well as other Orenda engines, and their work was absolutely instrumental to the US becoming superior to the USSR in jet engine technology. I don't know if this is publicly available information, so you might have to trust me on it, but I guarantee you even the US had a 20+ year period where it had to steal engineers and tech in order to jumpstart it's lead, which is exactly what we are seeing with China.

If the WS-15 ends up being serviceable in 6 more years, it will have taken SARI and Xi'an almost 35 years to re-create something marginally better than the current Russian engines, and no where near what the US is delivered routinely by PW and GE. Chinese engines can't approach the thrust of Western engines, nor the reliability.

So say they iron out the kinks in the WS-15 (though odds are they'll settle for the WS-10). They then have a roughly 1990s era engine, when the US will be deploying Adaptive Cycle Engines etc.

Sure, but this always how it works. The first high-quality engine will take 35 years, the next 15. The important thing here is to develop the capability to manufacture high-quality single crystal components.

As far as adaptive cycle engines, China is also already researching them. They also have a lead in supersonic combustion as of today.

Discounting the competition is sure path to defeat. I am not in the semiconductor industry, while everyone is chasing a node sizes down to zero, I think the real breakthroughs will be in reducing the production costs to zero.

Music, movies, software, high speed pizza delivery

Underrated response.

As true today as when it was written!

Computer hacker, pizza deliverator, and greatest swordsman in the world, at your service.

There's Tesla as an American car company, which is arguably the most fearsome in the world right now. Kind of interesting how US manufacturing lead in several industries is tent-poled by one immigrant, Elon Musk. SpaceX doesn't just manufacture rockets, they are also now the largest satellite manufacturer in the world.

We're also really good at manufacturing houses and food. Besides cars, houses, and food actually representing a good chunk of physical things we buy, more of our spending is moving towards software/information in which we have a crazy lead.

I see it as manufacturing was displaced by an even more value adding industry. Though certainly it isn't good for our national security to be relying so much on imports for physical goods.

I think Tesla is a tech company and not a car company. The amount of technologies that goes into a Tesla car is unreal and Tesla abilities to use the sensors and chip on car and update a car via software is rather fearsome.

Why not both?

Tesla does, after all, manufacture cars — it doesn’t just write software that goes into cars made by others.

I’m not really seeing that - a Tesla Model S seems to me like a much simpler device than a Mercedes S Class. Talking about overall complexity, not just software.

Why Mercedes electric cars are not Tesla quality then? I mean the drive, the interior is better in Mercedes.

Actually, we're really not that great at manufacturing houses. We have too few where they are needed, the quality standards both in terms of energy efficiency, design and construction tend to be low, and consumer satisfaction is reportedly dropping.

Too few where needed is a product of laws. Most people have no idea what makes a quality house and so pick the wrong things to focus on. Codes don't allow junk houses, and energy efficiency is pretty high - what counts as a passive house in some areas is too poorly insulated for the northern US code.

You excel in cultural exports still.

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