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?).
