NASA Looks to the Future With Eye on the Past
DEC 04, 2006
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.020656
The Washington Post : Some 1,000 years ago, Viking sailors became Europe’s first great maritime explorers -- setting out for places unknown, not really understanding what they were finding, and often not returning home. It was a halting beginning to what later flowered when southern European powers sailed and colonized the globe and to what is now as unremarkable as a tanker of oil or a shipment of apples leaving home port for delivery halfway around the world.As Michael Griffin, the head of NASA, sees it, humanity is setting out on an interplanetary quest not dissimilar to what began with the Vikings. An age of space exploration has begun, but only with the same confused baby steps that brought Leif Eriksson briefly to Vinland and North America (or was it Greenland?).
© 2006 American Institute of Physics
