You pretty much just made the case for Palm Springs/Palm Desert being the first community that puts in driverless car infrastructure. It's relatively isolated a couple hours east of LA, and there's already a second "limited access/limited speed" road system: golf cart lanes (usually shared with bicycles). There's a large reasonably well-off older population who already get around town on golf carts, so adding autonomy to the carts and infrastructure to support it would probably be effective and widely accepted.

Enceladus is probably a better candidate-- there's reason to believe that it's as little as a few meters to get to liquid water that's already known to have most of what you need for life. It's much farther away though, so it's a lot longer to get there.

It's not that clean an environment around space station. It's more llike the space equivalent of Pigpen from the old Peanuts comics- a station with a cloud of contamination floating along with it. There was a microgravity facility that was very loosely coupled to ISS, but it still has to be coupled so that when the space station maneuvers your things keep up. If you really need microgravity it tends to be easier to make a free flyer and stick it in a higher orbit. The possibility of re-usability is appealing, but it rarely seems to work out to be cost effective for anything large-- the cost of making the stuff is usually much less than the cost of all the testing and verification that it will actually work when it gets there.

The movie analogy is one of my favorites. I like to point out to people that you can send a small rover to Mars for the same cost (or less) than making a couple of really bad movies about sending people there. You can send a large rover for about the cost of a James Cameron extravaganza or two about it.

Or they could have included three or four more copies of the lander and still cost less than sending humans. Rosetta has been in space for 10 years-- there aren't going to be humans floating around in tin cans in deep space for that long for a *long* time. At least not live ones.

That's not an argument for manned missions so much as an argument to either make things we're sending smaller and more capable or increase our ability to send larger and larger things. A significant portion of the mass you send on a human mission will be just stuff to keep the people alive, limiting the amount of stuff you can send for them to do experiments or massively increasing the cost because you're trying to send a general lab. If you're developing a set of very general lab stuff that humans can take halfway across the solar system, for the foreseeable future (even with significant reductions in cost to orbit) it's going to be less expensive and lower risk to make a robot that operates the lab and feeds it with stuff.

Delivery vans often reduce other traffic-- a UPS truck going through a neighborhood dropping things off might be eliminating a bunch of local trips to run errands, reducing the traffic on local roads and the need for parking at local sellers.

When I was using a bike for primary transportation and we got 3 feet of snow in one day (and another foot the next) the only reliable transportation was bike. I helped push a lot of stuck cars out, only to watch them creep along and get stuck again.

Bike gets stuck? Pick it up and move it. Get to a street that's not plowed? Carry the bike. I went grocery shopping by bike in that mess, and it was *way* better than any other transportation.

Or Herschel & Planck?

http://orbitalhub.com/?p=475

They don't stay together, but they're large satellites launched in a stack. The Herschel load doesn't go through the Planck structure, so maybe it doesn't count.

Word actually has a "comment" feature that attaches comments to particular locations in the text, and a flag that lets you show/hide them. It's been there for quite a long time. It works quite well.

Yes, they track usage. They know what page you're on.

3% to 5% failure rate is about typical for more reliable launch vehicles.

It's not like airplane flight yet.

The NASA centers that buy spacecraft and instruments still do some in-house builds, partly to maintain the skill base so they can be smart buyers. For instruments they tend to build things that are first of a kind. But even in those cases they're part system or instrument integrator, part builder, because nearly all the pieces are purchased from outside shops.

It also rewards lying, cheating, and fraud, which have all increased in science as the competitive pressure (for positions and funding) to publish large volumes of high-impact research in short times has increased.

Overall an excellent post-- too bad you posted anon so fewer will see it (I don't have mod points).

To expand on the quoted section-- good management of technical people is finding the areas where people are exceptional and putting them into positions where you can best use those skills, and avoiding forcing them into areas where they aren't particularly special or interested interested in becoming so (which will make them unexceptional).

I should also point out that there's a very fuzzy line between "engineer", "scientist", and "inventor" (which you sort of imply, but I'll come out and say it). A very substantial part of many science fields is engineering to make the observation that you're trying to make. And anybody can "invent" something that they need, but it usually takes a bunch of engineering to implement it, much of which gets done by the inventor. Even on a small scale, a significant fraction of engineers have to "invent" things on a small scale on a regular basis.

Or it could be because they're a disproportionate fraction of the cars on the road in California even if most people who drive them are pokey, when you multiply the numbers by the rate, you still get into the top 20. I've seen Toyota lots in LA that look like they're the storage lot at the end of the Prius assembly line-- hundreds of them as far as you can see. On the road, it's pretty rare to not be able to see at least one in your field of view. The C probably made it onto the list because it's more likely to be driven by younger people who aren't hypermiling yet.