The lunchbox sats are not as capable as a recon sat desired by the NSA, etc. You may perhaps argue that 100 pound sats are all that the NSA needs, but they clearly want a lot more -- IIRC the NSA was getting push back against proposed billion dollar satellites.

  I think it is very good assumption that the NSA already knows about the benefits of miniaturization and high-end sensors used in the small sats your referred to . But if a 4 kg or 40 kg sat could satisfy their desires, they would be using them (and likely are using them too). The real spy-eye in the sky will be big for the foreseeable future.

Probably not great for cheap spy satellites.

Cost is still $10,000 per pound to LEO. Some existing commercial launch systems already match that price. The 100 pound payload limit is a real problem though as effective recon sats will be considerably heavier in order to have big enough lenses for high res images as well as the transmitter, solar panels, etc. The best recon sats are expected to be roughly equivalent to the Hubble telescope. Note that the Hubble cannot take good images of the earth because it cannot track the ground.

From the article on KH-11 recon sat

The maximum diameter of the spacecraft is 10 feet or 120 inches with an estimated length something over 43 feet. The long telescope barrel is on the order of 8.94-9.3 feet in diameter. Titan-23D could place 24,600 lbs in polar orbit while Titan-34D could place 27,600 lbs into polar orbit. The KH-11 SSB mass application is about 3,289 lbs dry while its fueled mass is about 10,568 lbs. The whole spacecraft dry mass is about 13,289 kilograms and the fueled mass is estimated between 24,500-25,800-27,500 lbs at orbital insertion depending on which booster is used. The KH-11 KENNON spacecraft was replaced in the early 1990’s by the KH- Advanced Crystal spacecraft.

The real advantages to this design is the small launch cost and the short prep. time needed for a launch (24 hours).

Is this another case of vitality curve management? GE's Jack Welch was the quintessential example of this policy and is considered one of the most effective company leaders ever.

Unless you worked at GE and were condemned to watch the layoffs year after year until you were finally canned due to being part of the bottom 10% -- or watching the dysfunctional games people played because of the policy

You don't have to cheat Einstein to populate the galaxy. Nanotech based Von Neumann machines could easily spread out and cover our galaxy in a million years, the technology is certainly not impossible, indeed it is likely to be developed in the relatively near future should we decide to do so, and the possibility to live indefinitely in mechanical or biological bodies does not seem to be impossible either.

What could we do in a 1000 or 10,000 years. The Fermi Paradox is entirely valid given the assumptions normally made for the prevalence of complex life that would be millions or billions of years ahead of us.

While it may be true that cost savings and the injury and grief associated with accidents is considerable. Few people are willing to pay for it. People want immediate intangible benefits.

Reduced insurance rates, reduced traffic jams including the use of the high-speed auto-drive lane, self-parking cars after drop-off, not having to chauffeur the kids, watching TV while "driving"

These are the reasons people will buy self-driving cars.

Sure, there are large layoffs in the tech industry, but big layoffs are not a new thing.

Two of the largest layoffs in US history occurred in 1993. 60K employees at IBM and 50K employees at Sears/KMart.

Big layoffs are a result of other business conditions, including.

An actual need to cut expenses -- bloated, slow-moving companies find themselves in the condition of declining sales, and big losses.

A desire to increase profit margins, often linked to increased stock prices -- CEO's can get lots of bonus compensation in this form

A result of chopping up a company, perhaps resulting from a hostile takeover.

None of these are unique to technology companies.

Of course NASA budget grew during the moon race and fell after that. Since then it increased most under Reagan and Bush 41 and dropped under Nixon, Bush-43 and Obama.

If you look at who controlled Congress, you get a slightly different picture but is is true the NASA budget rise and fall with either party in charge.

Considering how few people vote based on the NASA budget, they are lucky to ever get any budget dollars.

There is lots of gold in space. One asteroid that NASA has looked at closely (Eros 433) has been estimated to contains trillions of dollars worth of gold at current prices as well as platinum, iron, nickel, etc.

It is usually considered the the bulk of the crustal gold and other heavy minerals were deposited on earth from asteroids during the late heavy bombardment.

Retrieving the gold, etc. from asteroids is certainly difficult and expensive using currently develop tech. but the gold is most certainly out there.

Maybe looking at percentage of Fed. budget or suchlike is not a good idea at all. How about constant dollars adjusted to 2014 from the Wikipedia article

This single highest year was 1966 spending 43.5 billion USD
By 1970 this had dropped to 23.0 billion
Bottomed out in 1980 at 14.3 billion
2013 was at 17.2 billion

Except for a few peak years at the height of the moon race, NASA budgets have been relatively consistent (usually between 15 and 20 billion 2014 dollars)

And the ancient planes also had the ability to fly between planets too. Don't think that these claims will stand up to review.

Ancient peoples were just as smart as us, but you need time to build the necessary tech. base in order to make advanced equipment so that you can discover advanced scientific theories and engineering disciplines.

Archie Bunker Editorial Rebuttal

Of course, you won't find such grants of authority to the federal government within the words of the U.S. Constitution -- what are you some kind of radical terrorist for even trying to do that?

Well -83 C is very close to the sublimation temperature of dry ice (-78 C) -- maybe with a little tweak you can cool your superconducting carbon using another carbon compound already widely used for cooling.

IMO, these announcements really don't really contribute anything meaninful. We pretty much know that simple organic molecules can form in a number of ways. Miller-Urey taught us quite a while ago that the basic precusrsor components were easily formed with basic chemistry that exists in nature.

Getting the components to dance together as a living entity is a tremendously more difficult and unsolved problem. According to all we know abiogenisis is very improbable -- even with eons of chemicals doing their thing.

Lots of people work delivery for UPS and Fedex

UPS driver $9.97-$32.74 per hour

Fedex driver $24,780-69,440 per year

A lot better than a lot of people make, esp. considering this is not high-skill labor.