NASA is scheduled to unveil the next step in its long-term plans for manned space exploration today:
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?).
“Fifty years into it, the amount of progress that the Vikings had made would not have been that noticeable, and that’s where we are in space flight today,” Griffin said in a recent interview. “I really think that’s the way to look at it.”
It’s good to see someone with vision actually working on this.
