COCOA, Fla. — Newt Gingrich is promising to establish a permanent base on the moon by 2020 if he's elected president.Yeah. Moon colonies. The staple of 1950s sci-fi. That's our forward-thinking Newt! Next on the Gingrich agenda, flying cars. Actually, he could get himself elected supreme potentate for life if he could create an actual working holodeck...
Gingrich, the former House speaker, told an overflow crowd gathered on Florida's space coast Wednesday that he wants to develop a robust commercial space industry in line with the airline boom of the 1930s. He also wants to expand exploration of Mars.
I've actually got to hand it to Gingrich here. I mean, there's pandering, and then there's this. This takes pandering to an entirely new level, a height heretofore only seen in the most fevered pitches of Al "I invented the internet" Gore when he's trying to sell more carbon credits so he can afford the premium fuel his houseboat burns by the barrel.
Don't have the technology? No problem! Don't have the funding? No problem! We'll all hide under a pile of coats and hope everything works out! It doesn't matter as long as he's telling folks what they want to hear! Gah. I wouldn't buy a used car from this snakeoil salesman, let alone vote for him.
Welcome Obama 2.0, the version that doesn't have to worry about re-election...
That is all.
16 comments:
Open marriages, and moon bases? Newt is trying to pander to the Heinlein fans.
Jay,
We're usually pretty in-tune, but on this I don't get the animosity.
As someone who does and has worked in the space industry I've got to tell you that the technologies exist, and we could certainly find the will.
The holdup is regulation. If Newt's solution for moon colonies is to provide an incentive and then ensure NASA, FAA, DoD get out of the way, then it's likely it could succeed. If the solution is tons of gov't spending using the Federal Acquisition Regulations and Congressional budgeting, etc, then doomed to failure.
He's trying to get the Space Coast Vote in the Florida Primaries.
But since the Anointed One has placed the U.S. Manned Space Program to a Pre-Sputnik Level, I don't see how this hurts Newt.
After all, since I was kid, all the Progressive/Liberal/Socialist/Communist Hippies in Politics have been whining about "Why are WASTING Money on Space when there's so many Starving People we can be helping?"
Well, Barry granted their Wish, and we really don't have a Space Program anymore. So I guess the Starving and the Homeless are all taken care of, right?
Besides, I wonder how the head of the DemaCommie National Committee, Debbie Wasserman-Schultz will respond to her FLORIDA Congressional Constituents that Newt is Crazy for trying to bring back the Space Program to all the out-of-work Floridians.
Schaudenfreunde strikes again!
Gotta disagree on this one, and agree with Newt. We have the intellect and the tech to do it. What we lack is the political will.
Jay,
The I-4 corridor in FL, which is the cape, Orlando and Tampa / St. Pete, is ripe for "conservative" Republican picking. Newt had to make such a statement -- that's where his FL base exists. If he wants FL's delegates, he's gotta get the far right vote away from Romney, and the far right exists in the I-4 corridor.
- Brad
Right. I understand all that.
But there are a ZILLION other, better ways to make points and hit Obama.
Look, if Newt had said "develop a new vehicle for delivering satellite payloads" I would have thought that to be a fantastic idea, and it would have accomplished the same goal.
Nope. Still don't buy it. This was a raw appeal to the "we were supposed to be living on the moon" Baby Boomers.
Nothing but transparent, crass pandering IMHO.
Moon Colony? Where do I sign up! Seriously.
... Talk about a place that would need strict gun control. Projectiles + the vacuum of space = nothing good.
I think this idea highlights the stupidity of "The One" to change the mission of NASA to be apologists for the total lack of muslim scientific inquiry in recent history. Rather, NASA exists for space exploration.
It's also the shameless pandering that politicians always do in an election.
I think space exploration - real exploration, not an orbital taxi service - is a perfectly legitimate thing for the fed.gov to do. My mood was actually starting to brighten when I read your leading sentence until I got to "by 2020." That's just BS.
Any vision of a future of human freedom must include real expansion into space. Without it we might as well all be stuck in Massachusetts. Staying forever earthbound means a future of Malthusian decline and eventual extinction.
Huge goverment programs have proven incapable of doing it. If we can find a way to junk the deadweight of bureaucracy and free up private efforts, I think it can be done sooner rather than later.
I'm not convinced that Newt's grandios rhetoric is the fuel to get us there. Gingrich is good at coming up with themes. Some of them are even good. He's not so good at figuring out which ones are good and following through on those.
LOL!! Pandering? A politician who panders for votes? Are you kidding me? They all are pandering for votses, that is what the primaries and election are all about.
These guys are politicians...its wha they do. Like boxers who box, and quarterbacks who throw, and runners who run....Politicians do two things, pander for votes and spend money....Its what they do!!
Yeah, but there's pandering, and then there's this. Gingrich might as well have promised a Lamborghini in every garage as a moon base by 2020.
It has been 10 years since the World Trade Center towers fell, and there's still nothing there except a beam of light.
10 years.
And yet Gingrich expects folks to swallow that we'll magically be able to build a sustainable moon colony in 20% LESS time?
Please. He was pandering in grand fashion to raw Baby Boomer nostalgia.
Newt Jetson, indeed...
Moon base by 2020? jetfxr69 is right. Just need to dust off some 1970's technology to get that done. Really.
Mars is still in need of undeveloped tech; not the moon.
If he's really proposing getting the FAA and NASA out of the way, by all means let him pander.
Jerry Pournelle has suggested the govt role here should be prizes like the Ansari X Prize. They cost nothing until someone succeeds; yet motivate private entities to get the task accomplished.
If we even tried to get to the moon, we'd likely at least have something (hardware) that we could point to and use somewhere. As it is, currently we spend a shitpot full of money via NASA and get nothing in return.
ANd without a goal, it is hard to tell if you accomplished something, which is what NASA is doing right now...aiming without a target.
It isn't, actually, that bad of an idea.
McThag called it right; you're wrong here Jay (though not about the political pandering :)), or the reporting you've read is. Newt is proposing a series of prizes (much like the Ansari X-Prize won by Burt Rutan in '02) that deliberately culminate in a sustainable civilian (or at least non-US government funded) lunar colony. If that comes about, Newt further suggests offering the colony US statehood (which would require the US withdrawing from an existing space and lunar treaty, thus the tight timeline). All of which is a topic Newt has discussed numerous times with the same general themes to my knowledge since '93 (and Jerry Pournelle reports since the early 1980's when Newt first contacted him about many of these concepts that appeared in his book A Step Further Out).
Any political campaign is going to consist of much material that blatantly panders to the interests of as much of the voting populace as a candidate can arrange for.
Is politics, is pandering.
Frankly, I'll take that sort of pandering over the nonsense in Obama's SOTU address any day.
No, I don't think Newt will be the nominee; too much of the loose cannon about him. But I want him to stay in and stay fighting -- and maybe wind up on the short list for Secretary of State. If he can just stay on message and attack the Obama Administration instead of Romney, he'll be doing a very valuable service indeed.
(No, I don't like Romney much either. But at this point, I'd vote for a wet paper towel if it was running against Obama.)
Jay: take heart. A LOT of people have seen through the charlatan that is Barrack Hussein Obama II. He will try to buy them off by promising the skies, as he did the other night, because that's all he knows how to do -- that, and the sort of dirty fighting he learned in Chicago. But it won't work nearly as well this time.
As Harry Truman said: "The American people can always spot a counterfeit. Sometimes it takes them a little while, but in the end they can always spot one."
Keep the faith.
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