When Steve Mahan was a kid in the 1960s, his mother would sometimes wake him in the early hours of the morning to watch the hours of television coverage preceding the launch of the Mercury space missions. "We would hear about all of the preparations, all of the technology, everything that led up to these moments," Mahan says. "And then we would count down'till you finally got to zero and ignition, and one of those rockets begins bellowing fire and smoke, and slowly begins to creep away from the grapples. Now 63 and having lost his sight, Mahan has become one of those capsule-bound explorers. In October 2015, he became the first member of the public to ride in Google's self-driving pod-like prototype, alone and on public roads.

On Election Night, voters in northeastern Ohio's Trumbull and Ashtabula counties made Sean O'Brien--a three-term Democratic state representative--their state senator. They also helped make Donald Trump president. In 2012, 60 percent of Trumbull's largely white, working class electorate voted for Barack Obama. In 2016, they flipped their support to the populist GOP candidate who offered his own promises for change. The partisan shift surprised O'Brien, but he realized it shouldn't have. Days before the election, O'Brien's cousin snapped a photo of his own front yard and sent it to the soon-to-be state senator.

Remember, remember, late 2015 November? You may recall it was getting chilly. That's certainly how the weather started feeling for startups seeking to bathe in the warm glow of venture capital. Silicon Valley could sense the crash coming. The unicorn reckoning was nigh.

The first commercial shipment by a self-driving truck was a beer run. Uber Technologies Inc.'s self-driving trucking unit, Otto, said Tuesday it partnered with brewing giant Anheuser-Busch Cos. to carry 51,744 cans of Budweiser on a shipment through Colorado. "Yes, you can go out right now and buy a can of beer that was shipped by a self-driving truck," Otto said. With "full support from the state of Colorado," Otto said, the white-and-red truck traveled from Fort Collins down Interstate 25 to Colorado Springs last Thursday "exit-to-exit without any human intervention." "Our professional driver was out of the driver's seat for the entire 120-mile journey down I-25, monitoring the self-driving system from the sleeper berth in the back," Otto said.

Otto, the self-driving truck company owned by Uber, recently completed what it claims was the first commercial delivery by a self-driving vehicle. A truck outfitted with Otto's autonomous driving technology shipped a truckload of Budweiser beer from Fort Collins, Co. to Colorado Springs, a distance of about 120 miles. Otto says the truck drove hands-free from exit to exit, though a human driver was in the cab for local streets and to take over in case of an emergency. Other Otto vehicles pre-mapped the route ahead of time, which followed Colorado's I-25. Some naysayers may consider that cheating, but it highlights an advantage of self-driving trucking fleets: As one such vehicle travels along a particular route, it can send mapping and other data to vehicles behind it as a helpful status update.

Walt Martin is kneeling, legs folded behind him, butt resting on his heels. "I've got to practice my yoga," he says, clearly joking. Never mind that we're in the cab of an 18-wheeler cruising through Colorado at 55 mph and Martin was, until a moment ago, the guy at the wheel. Maybe he was feeling cocky. After all the truck, outfitted with 30,000 worth of hardware and software from San Francisco startup Otto, had just hours before made the world's first autonomous truck delivery.