I think it's like most jobs: compensation isn't related to how tough the work is, but about the abundance of people who can fill those positions. Administrators earn more because there are relatively few people qualified and willing to do the work. If university compensation was based on the difficulty of the work, adjunct and assistant professors would make far more than they do.
I'd like to note that the shuttle fleet received a "glass cockpit" upgrade (around 1997-1998), replacing many mechanical indicators with multi-function displays. Here's a link to a (small) side-by-side comparison:
Prior to the upgrade, the space shuttle looked dated compared to commercial airliners flying at the time. It's debatable whether the shuttles looked more ancient then or now.
Couple of years ago flew on an MD-80/DC-10 that had what looked like the original 1970's-era instrumentation. It did look pretty ancient. Wonder how many pilots are even qualified to fly on that, or if the qualifications are different.
The same plane was leaking fuel out of the wing throughout the flight. Not really confidence-inspiring.
There's a few parts of that anecdote which confuse me as a pilot. The first one is two vastly different aircraft separated by a slash as if to indicate that they are equivalent. The second is an air crew that completed a flight, while leaking fuel, without declaring emergency and putting it down. Lastly, someone actually observing fuel leaking from the aircraft and thinking "meh, it's just old," rather than alerting the air crew.
(Put another way, I have doubts that you were observing a fuel leak. Those are generally pretty easy to notice -- "why are we consuming two thousand extra pounds of fuel per hour?")
Almost all pilots today still learn to fly on the old "steam" gauges, not on glass, and many glass cockpits still have the basic analog gauges as a backup.
One of the reasons for the skycrane is that it minimizes the area of the Martian surface that will be disturbed by the landing rockets. The skycrane approach moves less surface soil around the landing site (decreasing travel distance to pristine subjects for geological study) and deposits less rocket exhaust (which complicates chemical and biological studies).
NASA has an excellent and free ebook, _When Biospheres Collide_ [1], which goes into great detail about the problems posed by biological contamination (both forward and back). The book dedicates a long chapter to the great lengths taken with the Viking landers to avoid contamination problems. Having read it, I'm not at all surprised NASA is giving alternatives a try.
The Viking program was resigned to regarding the surface soil as untrustworthy for at least some (if not all) of their experiments. To get around this, the landers' robotic arms dug a few inches into the Martian surface to reach uncontaminated soil.
As for driving, the other commenters have it right: Curiosity isn't particularly fast and it's nice to start the scientific experiments sooner, rather than later. Moreover, driving around consumes limited electrical power which has to be shared with all the other systems on board, including transmitters and scientific instruments. Every minute spent moving from place to place is a minute of reduced data collection.
They drive at mm/s speeds. Moving over a few meters because the soil is stirred up is a huge waste of energy and time, not to mention the risk of failure.
Actually, 30 m/hour is 8 mm/sec. But that's a bad choice of units, because seconds is not a good mission time scale.
The point is that, within a couple of hours, you can drive beyond the contamination radius. And, over the span of the mission, you most certainly will.
Sorry, I wasn't able to figure out where I first heard about the contamination concern with MSL. I think I may have heard it in a video interview, which makes it nigh unsearchable. That said, a search of nasa.gov reveals several mentions of the use of a skycrane to reduce rocket exhaust contamination in relation to other missions, particularly ExoMars.
I imagine there's also a small, but non-trivial number of people on GitHub who wouldn't be readily identified as programmers. For example, I'm acquainted with a civil engineer that's on GitHub so he can contribute to software used with his astronomy hobby.
Volumes, sure, but those volumes need to specialize and, to a certain extent, stand alone. In other words, don't just put "to be continued" at the end of a chapter; find a logical place to segment your work.
I think it's unfair to say that the focus on word count is absurd. Like most things, writing well requires practice. The only meaningful metric educators have to determine whether a student has actually practiced is word count. The unfortunate thing about the way writing is taught isn't the emphasis on word count; it's the total neglect of editing.
I received a formal education in technical writing. In college, I probably submitted a peak of 40 thousand words to my professors in a single semester. But I wrote at least double that, in the form of things like notes, outlines, and stuff discarded as inadequate or unnecessary. That was the chief thing I learned: not to write less, but to discard more.
One of my favorite adages about writing is a good complement to Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's quote. It's Sturgeon's Law: "Ninety percent of everything is crud." To get ten good words, you're going to have to write 100. I don't think it's a bad idea to teach that to kids, so long as they're taught to throw away the other 90.
"Also a little regret knowing they will never go back."
Wow, I had never thought of that aspect of the Apollo program. It's a little sad that of the 22 people to orbit the moon, land on the moon, or both, it appears just four of them ever made a subsequent space flight.
"In March 1972, Aldrin retired from active duty after 21 years of service, and returned to the Air Force in a managerial role, but his career was blighted by personal problems. His autobiographies Return To Earth, published in 1973, and Magnificent Desolation, published in June 2009, both provide accounts of his struggles with clinical depression and alcoholism in the years following his NASA career."
