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The basics are pretty distributed, further work involved increasing lifespan at high temperatures, but also some work towards switching at least some turbine stages from separated blades into "blisks" - entire turbine stage is one crystal, including the hub.

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I've heard it said that growing crystals in gravity is tricky... If we could do this in space, gravity free, we could get better crystals.

Is that correct? Pardon for asking a bit of a question to your comment. I don't know too much about growing crystals for things like jet engine blades.

I, too, heard this but in a different context: pharma growing pure crystals for analysis by x-ray diffraction. There was a discussion a while back whether these lab-grown crystals were truly contributing to ISS’s reason to exist or an excuse to keep the lab going.

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