Newt Gingrich, courting voters in Florida’s NASA-heavy “Space Coast,” pledged to build an American lunar colony within eight years if elected president.
“By the end of my second term we will have the first permanent base on the moon and it will be American,” he said. According to Gingrich, the base would be used for “science, tourism, and manufacturing” and create a “robust industry” that would grow “precisely on the model of the airlines in the 1930s.”
The speech was a direct challenge to Mitt Romney, who has accused Gingrich of favoring big government with his past proposals for lunar exploration and colonization.
“I’m not in favor of spending that kind of money to do that,” Romney said in an Iowa debate last month.
Gingrich certainly picked the right audience for his idea: the Speaker drew wild applause and standing ovations from a packed hotel ballroom in Cocoa, FL. But it was not immediately clear either how much the proposal would cost, how it would be funded, and even if Gingrich intended to increase NASA’s budget in the first place, which he criticized for wasteful spending and stifling bureaucratic management. President Obama cancelled George W. Bush’s lunar landing program in 2010 because it was deemed too expensive, instead opting to fund private companies’ space exploration work. And Bush’s goal of returning to the moon by 2020 was far more modest than establishing a functioning colony.
Gingrich suggested that the government could achieve many of America’s goals for space exploration by setting aside 10% of NASA’s budget as prize money to encourage private companies to research lunar technology, interplanetary exploration, and indefinite propulsion.
After his speech, Gingrich held a quiet roundtable discussion with analysts, business leaders, and researchers in the local space and technology industry, where his plan was greeted with a friendly reception, if not without some skepticism. One panelist noted that NASA’s regulations were in place in part because of the catastrophic human and financial losses that come with a crash and that cutting the fat may be hard as a result.
Edward Ellegood, a space policy analyst at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, raised concerns to reporters about whether prize money could effectively spur a project of the size Newt described.
“I’ve heard from people who’ve been involved with these kind of things in the past, that prizes of that scale don’t work very well,” Ellegood said. “They seem to work very well with smaller scale things, but whether you could scale up to a lunar colony…”
Still, the political value was clear. As NASA’s budget has scaled back, Florida’s space engineering industry has been hit hard and the promise of huge new projects could mean thousands of jobs returning. Robert Whelen, a VP at tech company Harris Corporation, told reporters after the roundtable that decreased NASA funding has meant a loss of 19,000 direct and indirect jobs in recent years.
“I think it’s a great plan,” Court Roberts, 67, a retired space scientist and Newt supporter, told TPM. He agreed with Gingrich that the private sector could outpace NASA in productivity and added that a president with a lunar colony goal could create a boom of engineering students inspired by the project to keep pace with China’s tech boom.
Dr. Patrick Fuller, a precinct captain in the area for Gingrich, also praised Gingrich’s commitment to space exploration on an economic basis.
“Scores of ideas have been born from space research,” he said. “Everything from scratch resistant glass to Teflon.”
Composite includes photo from lculig / Shutterstock
Benjy Sarlin
Benjy Sarlin is a reporter for Talking Points Memo and co-writes the campaign blog, TPM2012. He previously reported for The Daily Beast/Newsweek as their Washington Correspondent and covered local politics for the New York Sun.
DOES IT? occur to anyone, that Russia & China have access to OUR SATELLITES, in space?? [ THEY NOW, HAVE CONTROL OVER OUR ENTIRE COMMUNICATIONS SYSTEM ] from the stupid & DANGEROUS decision, to give up our access!! Space is being WEAPONIZED... by other countries now, because WE gave up our access, to space.. Can you see the bigger picture here?? We are defenseless!! Thats not smart. Its not about the MOON.. Newt knows whats going on up there, he just didnt want to scare you folks! Its time AMERICANS, started THINKING for themselves!!
freedom.1.american Grampa, your meds are on the counter, next to the coffee maker. Please don't drive!
This is the new sine qua non of pandering. All future pandering attempts must measure up, or be found wanting.
GREAT IDEA just what is needed a national goal that is not a war. Someone is going to do eventually Best if it is the USA. GO FOR IT!
This is the dumbest thing I have ever heard. How about taking all those brilliant minds currently out of work on the space coast and re-training them to fill the thousands of tech jobs out there (that we can apparently only fill now with Indians on HB1 visas)?
FTR Teflon was developed in the late 1930s and used extensively a few years later in the Manhattan Project to build the A-bomb.
We're already spending billions of dollars a year on a Moon rocket called the SLS that both Democrats and Republicans in Congress requested NASA to develop. So we might as well use to build a base on the Moon!
Marcel F. Williams
Hey Noot, could you check out the moon sites personally?....please
But wouldn't all the colonists be illegal aliens? Who will deport them back to the states?
Putting a colony on the moon: anybody gone through the numbers? What it would cost to get one person there (or Gingrich himself, who is above average weight, and would cost more). What it would cost to keep one person alive on the moon, for one day? What it would cost to assemble an Iphone there and then ship it back to Earth?
http://morefreedomfries.blogspot.com/
Lets get rid of Medicare and go to the phucking moon !!
magicmaker The Medicare budget, which probably waste about $200 billion annually in waste thanks to the hospitals and clinics that are gaming the system, cost more than $489 billion annually. NASA's manned spaceflight related budget is less than $8 billion dollars annually. So if you completely eliminated the manned spaceflight budget, that money could help to fund the extremely wasteful Medicare program for almost 6 days:-) Wow!
Of course, since our investment in space actually creates more wealth that it consumes, we'll actually lose money.
Marcel F. Williams
won;t that include ALOT of NEW revenues to finance and ALOT of BIG GOVT activity to accomplish??? just saying
fixbone Ssshh.
Sounds like Big Gummint to me.
Love the photoshop pic, priceless.
And Newt went on to say: “When they have 13,000 Americans living on the moon, they can petition to become a state.” Well Newt no they cannot. For such a smart guy I would think you would be aware of international treaties we have signed before pandering for votes. One specific treaty forbids any country from claiming the moon as their own.
jsfox Newt Gingrich don't need no stinkin' treaties.
jsfox Revoke our adherence to multinational treaty? Feature not a bug.
Okay, seriously, just by way of background, the Outer Space Treaty is a major bugbear of the libertarianish Heinlein worshipping Proximire-hating faction within the sci-fi fan crowd that Newt likes to hang with when he's not actively advocating evil and using his mouth as a flamethower.
They believe, with some justice, that the whole thing was a just an evil plot engineered by Jerry Weisner (Kennedy's science advisor) to cut the legs out from under manned space flight--or at least to make sure that it would fizzle after Apollo. Weisner was very much of the ideological stripe in liberalism that believes there just is something uniquely wasteful (in the sense that the money is literally wasted in the sense of being poured into some metaphorical hole without any practical return on the investment) about money spent on manned space flight. His insight was that if we could claim territory in space, we'd be spending a lot of money, well, developing the technology to send people into space to claim it.
The real crapper, is that both sides' goals were frustrated by the treaty. The people who wanted manned space flight to fizzle so we could use the money for their priorities didn't get their way. But the "destiny in space" crowd didn't get their way either because, without the ability to claim a chunk of the Moon or Mars, we just ended up pointless futzing around in low earth orbit. And, worst of all, the money we've spend on LEO futzing hasn't given us the kind of economic benefits we got from Apollo. We're not inspiring new generations of kids to become engineers which was a major economic boon until all those guys (yeah, they were almost all guys) aged out of the economy and retired, we haven't pushed ourselves to do impossible things, spurring the creation of wealth-creating new technologies, and we haven't created the kind of jobs Apollo did.
jsfox This may be incorrect, but I am pretty sure we have never signed any treaty regarding the moon or space. Other countries have, but not the US, China, or Russia.
.....meanwhile,....Newt has instructed his followers to put on their new Nikes and drink the cyanide once the comet passes overhead.......
What makes me think he'll want to relocate America's poor and unemployed to said lunar colony?
ibsteve2u hasn't he seen 'alien' .... i ain't volunteering to be no terraformer....
ibsteve2u Exactly. Time to dust off Frederic Pohl's Space Merchants and Merchants' War novels. He'll want to make it a prison colony for liberals, the poor, and atheists. Want to keep breathing air? You WILL work 16 hour days for $1. No? Out the airlock with you!
Underpants
????
Lunar Base!
I thought he was a historian?
Turns out he's just history.
I support this only if Newt volunteers to let us shoot him to the moon in a rocket, and he promises to stay there.
Rocket Keynesianism.
Panderer in Chief. Saying whatever your audience wants to hear does not mean you have vision.
Wildeye He doesn't need vision, of course, if he can get enough stupid toads to vote for him based on his shamelss empty-promise pandering.
"After his speech, Gingrich held a quiet roundtable discussion with analysts, business leaders, and researchers in the local space and technology industry, where his plan was greeted with a friendly reception"
You mean these people actually take this moron seriously? Sheese...
reedbob6 If you just tell people what they want to hear however remotely far-fetched, as long as you can keep a straight face there seems to be no limit.
'Dr. Patrick Fuller, a precinct captain in the area for Gingrich, also praised Gingrich’s commitment to space exploration on an economic basis.
“Scores of ideas have been born from space research,” he said. “Everything from scratch resistant glass to Teflon.”'
If I'm not mistaken, Teflon was developed well before the space program began; its first practical use was in the Manhattan Project which built the first atomic bombs. [pause for checking], yep, patented 1941, used tor valves in the gaseous diffusion enrichment plant K25.
Well, I guess having your facts straight isn't a big deal for a Gingrich precinct captain.
it'll be a libertarian paradise i'm sure...
No Exit The guv'mint may try to tax them for oxygen usage and shipments of food, but the lunar teahad will rise up and fight the Obamas of the the world - er, earth. First they try to tax, then they want to take away the people's ray guns!
OverreachTHISNo Exit I hear Andrew Ryan is going to build the moon base.
Said Ryan: " I chose the impossible. I chose... Rapture, a city where the artist would not fear the censor, where the scientist would not be bound by petty morality, Where the great would not be constrained by the small! And with the sweat of your brow, Rapture can become your city as well. "
Ironically, Newt pandering for Fl. votes is unintentionally possibly the best thing he has said this whole campaign. Classic Keynsian economics. We're facing a liquidity trap with corporations flush with cash but demand too low to decrease unemployment. Money is as cheap as it has been in a very long time. The way out of this mess is for the government to spend more. Raising taxes on the wealthy and using that money on high-tech local jobs and research isn't quite as good as puttiing some money into high-tech and research and the rest into state aid to pay for more teachers and others laid off in the recession and other infrastructure improvement., but it's a whole lot better than tax deductions that just go into savings, or doing nothing. At the start of this mess, economists knew the hole was at least $2 trillion, but we only spent $800 billion, and only half of that was really useful. So another $1.5 trillion in stimulus spending should just about do it.
Newt, Show me the money!!!
Okay, I gotta get to bed, but Ileave you with the following for your edification...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5FMJP3dqE0&list=UUofKlQXMFE-zXWDmlSWxBQA&index=2&feature=plcp
Hayes/Colbert '12!
If he gets the nomination, his promises stacked on top of each other could get us to the moon without a rocket. We could walk there, climbing ever upwards on the words and phraseology of Professor Newt Gingrich.
The guy's name is Court Roberts? Funny.
Well, I guess we now know what the title of President Newt's next book will be: "I Aim For The Stars, But Sometimes Hit Tehran."
MrJonz I just shoot them up, I don't know where they come down, it's not my department, says Dr. Werner von Braun.
What does Ron Paul say about this?
If anyone is out to the moon, it's Ron Paul.
fargo116
I think libertarians mostly obsess over asteroids. It's sort of the libertarian ideal -- every man with his own self-contained 'stake', separated by millions of miles from any other living soul.
Libertarians are basically the toothless gold-panning prospectors of today.
fargo116 Ron Paul thinks we should not invade the Moon, that it is a sovereign nation and it's people just want to be left alone.
Cyberduckie fargo116 We really should stop stealing their soil samples.
No blood for soil!
(Sorry, couldn't resist)
peterprincipleCyberduckiefargo116
Blood and Nightsoil, as the Germans used to say...
@David Cyberduckie fargo116 Newt: This will be my last territorial demand on Pluto.
fargo116 That should be "its people". My lunar module for an edit button.
Stupid NASA scientists. You didn't really think Newt was talking to YOU, do ya? Sure, he wants you to build a permanent moon base, manned by 13,000 people. Of course, he won't give you any government money for it.
The solution?
Bake sales!
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