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Newt Skywalker Promises Moon Base by 2020

Today in Florida, where’s he’s pimping for primary votes, Newt Gingrich offered his “bold vision” for the U.S. space program. And that vision is a moon colony. An American moon colony. From New Scientist:

Gingrich said that he would like to eventually see a colony established on the moon, though he did not give a timeline for achieving it.

He added that he had once proposed legislation that would allow a moon colony of at least 13,000 Americans to petition to become a US state, and that he still supported the idea.

What for, you ask? For research, manufacturing, and tourism. Because without a viable space vehicle to take even a half-dozen people to near-Earth orbit, we can certainly build satellites and tour the cosmos by 2020, right? Of course, Kennedy made it happen. More on that in a sec.

And just when you think he’s pandering to the space industry, he goes and says that NASA is “spending too much time studying things”? …

Gingrich complained that NASA was spending too much time studying things rather than building and testing technologies. “We’d be better off to do 1 percent of the current studies and 10 times as many experiments,” he said.

I’m not sure what that means, but whatever. Of course, George W. Bush had this idea, too. But it proved too expensive considering that a moon colony has questionable real benefit. Besides, can we even afford that kind of stuff? Nope:

At the height of the Apollo programme in the 1960s, Nasa’s budget rose to 3.45% of America’s GDP – reflecting the sort of funding needed to get major human spaceflight projects going in short amounts of time.

After 1975, Nasa’s budget dropped below 1% of American GDP and the space agency entered what many might call its wilderness years … That figure has remained under 1% ever since and, in the past decade, has hovered around 0.5% of GDP.

I mean, who wouldn’t want to go to the moon? But if we’re just gonna throw out ideas with no basis in reality, I’d like to build an exact replica of the Enterprise from a base on Mars, staff it with bikini-clad clones and a full bar, and then take a pleasure cruise to Alpha Centauri. For America.

(via Short Sharp Science and The Guardian)

(via adailyriot)