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Candidate Gingrich Pushes a Moon Base, Other Space Initiatives
New submitter thomas.kane writes "Newt Gingrich announced yesterday, while visiting Florida's Space Coast, a visionary plan for the future of space travel. He suggested a combination of the current private incentives and a government funded section, developing a moon base, commercial near earth orbit, and continuous propulsion systems to better reach Mars." "Visionary" seems an awfully positive spin on it; Gingrich is not the first President or presidential candidate to propose revisiting the moon — and the moon seems like small potatoes, by some measures.
The US federal debt is going to ensure that this never happens. Not this side of 2050. Not even if the Chinese start making concrete plans to do the same.
Newt Gingrich's new Secret Service code name:
MOONBAT ALPHA
TLR
A man no more knows his destiny than a tea leaf knows the history of the East India Company
GWB set up a program that he knew he couldn't finance and thus put all the expenses on whoever would come after him. Of course, this didn't stop them from handing out heaps of money for useless non-development - like $450,000,000 dollars for the "Ares-1x" - an ordinary surplus shuttle booster with a mockup stage strapped on top of it, that didn't even manage to separate properly and couldn't tell anything about the flight characteristics of the real Ares-1 (with a longer 5-segment booster) anyway. For comparison: the cost of that flight was more than two full flights of the Ariane-5.
Sounds like he's taking the evil dictator thing a little too far.
After building a base on the moon, he will point a giant "laser" at the Earth, and threaten the rest of the world with annihilating a major city every day unless the world pays the US (evil pinky finger) $10.5 trillion. Then he will use that money to pay off the national debt (except that which is owed to Social Security), and thus balance the budget.
Of course, the whole thing will be stopped when a spy with bad teeth shows up.
I am officially gone from
"Tonight, I am directing NASA to develop a permanently manned space station and to do it within a decade." -President Ronald Reagan, 25 January 1984.
I'm glad y'all weren't advising President Kennedy when he planned to put a man on the moon. Unlike the pie-in-the 'investments' of the current administration (that were payoffs for campaign kickbacks), the space program has a proven record of spinoffs that have been good for the country and of all humanity. The computers you are reading this on, the satellites that move countless terabytes of information, even the fuel cells that might power the next generation of MacBooks all had their genesis from NASA research.
Not to mention that the BEST place to get experience with a serious Mars trip is our own moon... at least convenient to Earth. If you want it to pay for itself, read The Man Who Sold the Moon. How many of those dreaded 1% would shell out big bucks for a piece of the ACTUAL FRIGGIN MOON. Plus, you could probably pay for it with the rounding error from the pork barrel programs we should cut anyway, heh.
/// Not a super-genius . . . yet. ///
Obviously US has no money for this, but that never stopped a politician from making promises. Besides, so much money can be stolen/printed and provided via contracts to various contributors.
Do you know what a popular government slogan was in the former USSR? "Apple trees will grow on Mars" - that was the 'next step of the revolution'. Obviously USSR didn't have a sound economy and couldn't feed its people, but it was a great 'vision' pushed by the government elite, to have people believe in some form of 'brighter future'.
Another slogan was: "To catch up to and overtake America".
I think in US now the slogan that Obama pushes is: "To catch up and overtake China".
You can't handle the truth.
It amazes me that anybody is still taking him seriously - let alone voting for him in these primaries.
Playing to the local base. He doesn't mean to follow through with a breath of it. In an age of hypocrites, Gingrich sets the standard for pathetic and has for a long, long time.
So if this President of the United States of American thing doesn't work out, maybe he can campaign to be the President of the Moon?
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Thats the problem with most manned space missions.
I think its important to keep a manned space program simply to keep the knowledge. People need an industry to work or most the knowledge gets lost.
NASA should concentrate more on science though. While I think the ISS is ubercool, I dont really see what the point of it is. Its cost over 100bn and doesnt do anything. Things like Hubble that cost a few billion have changed our view of the universe. WMAP, Kepler, Cassini, Voyager numerous Mars missions, they all have trumped the ISS but cost less than the ISS combined.
Future missions to Europa, sample return mission to Mars, James Webb.. just amazing science there. We have already had to can some great things like the terrestrial planet finder telescopes.
Radio telescopes on the far side of the moon also proposed liquid lense telescopes (ive read about spinning mercury to do this) are interesting but the cost would be absolutely insane. So many real things we could be doing.
If I sign up, do I get an awesome evil henchman future-suit?
Gingrich said this in Florida, a few weeks before the Floriday primary. Newt needs a win here to cement his momentum, because if Romney wins it's a serious blow to his candidacy. Because of that, I expect him to spend the next couple of weeks telling voters any outlandish fantasy it takes to get elected, up to and including telling people in Miami he'll invade Cuba and kill Castro.
Floridians are promised a moon base right before primary night. Texans will be promised their independence. Arizonians will be promised a border fence. Pennsylvania will be promised a revitalized steel industry. The grain belt will be promised increased access to foreign markets for meat, milk, and grain. Alaska will get more wells AND greater environmental protections at the same time. So will Ohio. Such is the power of American ingenuity. We will have the largest economy, the largest and best equipped army, the healthiest economy, the best education, equal opportunity for everyone, but no limit on personal wealth and power. Anyone can have a gun, and we will be the safest nation on earth.
Meanwhile, opponents will be defined by their positions on controversial hot-button but trivial issues of no national consequence whatsoever.
Could be almost any politician's platform; except that Newt is an exemplary example of how extreme such cynical manipulation of the electorate can go. He truly holds the citizens of this country in contempt; no one sees the world as clearly as he does; no one possesses such incisive insight. He will do or say anything to get elected. In short he is a psychopath.
Alarmingly, that seems to be what an inexplicably large proportion of the population wants right now. It's a scary time to be an American.
What are all those aerospace researching bureaucrats doing all day if not sending people to the moon? The brilliance of this question is that it reveals a new way to determine whether or not we should cut government funded programs:
Is the program doing precisely what middle school students expect it to do? If not, the axe.
Consequently, this is a great way to connect with the average voter.
Government undertaking grandiose projects, be it man on moon, be it universal healthcare, be it war on poverty, are all typically Democratic thinking. The Republicans usually slant towards free markets, low deficits, small government etc. In moderation both sides have good ideas. When ideas from either party are taken to the extremes, it becomes grotesque. Suddenly because Floridians think they will benefit by the revival of government spending on space research, he is pandering to them. Such pandering is the bane of democracy.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Going back to the moon is not small potatoes, by any measure.
The pessimistic case, it's done by Government, will cost a fortune and get us what, a publicity stunt? Worse, NASA will take it seriously, develop extensive plans for what we really ought to do, and then as soon as the publicity wears off, cancel everything at even more cost. 1972, deja vu.
In the what-should-be-done vein, we (humans) need to go to the moon, plant a base, and then develop that base into an industrial economy in its own right. This means that we will need to find resources on the moon, develop them, and aim for a self-sustaining colony.
No politician will ever support this, because the time frame of such a project is fifty years, or a hundred years. Where's the electability in that? What political force in the US could ever conceive of something that didn't pay off in the current election cycle? What money manager would invest hard cash in a project that was two hundred quarters out? Nobody I know.
China, maybe. They are not (yet) governed by short sighted kapitalists (sic) or even more short sighted politicians.
Don't take life too seriously; it isn't permanent.
USA can live with 10 aircraft carriers, or perhaps 9
The savings from not having to maintain 1 (or 2) navy armada (aka carrier group) can easily be channeled to build a permanent American moon base
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
It isn't just competition from Earth orbit that is the problem:
Most of the cheap, reasonably immediate ROI, stuff is, indeed, in satellites. That's why they aren't even a serious question anymore(with the exception of specific scientific payloads) and all sorts of people send them up all the time.
If you want to do something Super Futuristic, just because it would be awesome, putting a base on a permanently hostile, airless, rock with nothing but geologic history(too small for an atmosphere, even if you generated one, basically zero chance that anything biological ever happened there) is both unambitious and rather unhelpful.
If you simply want to do research on closed-loop environments, and how to maintain them in the long term, you could dust off Biosphere 2, or build an equivalent based on lessons learned, for absolute peanuts compared to the cost of getting just about anything out of Earth's gravity well. Just by shutting the door and building in a communications delay you can simulate most of the problem for a few percent of the cost, and easily re-run the experiment with tweaks if it doesn't go properly the first time.
If you want to establish a long-term extra-terrestrial human presence, choosing a body that is simply too small to ever be even remotely comfortable and living in hamster tubes seems rather pointless when you have Mars, which is close to being a winter-jacket-and-oxygen-mask environment in some locations.
It's simultaneously vastly overpriced as a space-habitation R&D exercise and vastly unambitious as a Grand Space Project.
Experience tells us that when politicians start making demands for highly expensive development/construction efforts, they've usually been bought (quite literally) by the industry or specific businesses involved. Now we know who's offering to fund Newt's campaign...
Gingrich has no serious plans about building a moon base. He's just pandering to Floridians to get their votes. You can rest assured that after Florida is done, he'll drop it like a bad habit.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
Maybe the point of the ISS is in gaining the experience necessary to eventually build reliable, human-habitable space stations further away than low orbit? Baby steps, people. Baby steps.
Obvious exits are NORTH, SOUTH, and DENNIS.
Coincidentally today is NASA's day of remembrance for all those who lost their lives during the pursuit of space.
Tomorrow (Jan 27) marks the 45th anniversary of the Apollo 1 fire that killed Command Pilot Virgil "Gus" Grissom, Senior Pilot Edward H. White and Pilot Roger B. Chaffee.
Saturday (Jan 28) marks the 26th anniversary of the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster that killed Greg Jarvis, Christa McAuliffe, Ronald McNair, Ellison Onizuka Judith Resnik, Michael J. Smith and Dick Scobee.
Next Wednesday (Feb 1) marks the 9 anniversary of the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster that killed Rick D. Husband, William McCool, Michael P. Anderson, David M. Brown, Kalpana Chawla, Laurel B. Clark, and Ilan Ramon.
Also the following were killed during astronaut training: Theodore Freeman, Elliot See, Charles Bassett, Clifton "C.C." Williams, and Robert Lawrence.
The following are were killed during space flight or cosmonaut training: Vladimir Komarov, Georgi Dobrovolski, Viktor Patsayev, Vladislav Volkov, Valentin Bondarenko, Yuri Gagarin, and Sergei Vozovikov.
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
should explain how they are going to get the rest of the party to agree to pay for it.
Because the current state of affairs is to butchers everything, give a free ride to corporations, and have the rich pay as close to nothing as they can.
Going to Space is not in the 'Neo cons' religious agenda.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
1. Manned telescope on the Moon. 2. Supply depot/launch pad for a Mars shot. 3. Fusion research (He^3) 4. Nuclear and other dangerous research (we can blow stuff up/melt down/whatever without affecting our biosphere!) 5. Space based manufacturing plant for future missions
I see them all whine about "Obama's debt", when most of that debt was acquired during Bush's two year term. Now they want austerity here at home, and at the same time this clown is promising a moon base.
If Obama was truly the evil socialist dictator that a few right-wingers call him up-thread, then why can't the Republican party not find a serious candidate to run against him? Obama isn't perfect, but I'll take him over this side-show act, any day of the week.
In November will be a lot like watching a professional wrestler punch a baby. No entertainment value whatsoever. It'll just be pathetic. I'm not a Republican and even I don't want to see that. I wish Palin would jump back into the race. Right now I think she could pick up the nomination on the grounds that all those other guys suck, and the campaign would be tremendously fun to watch even if she loses.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
If Gingrich was anything close to a "visionary", he'd be talking space elevator, not moon bases.
What he is, is a liar that will say anything to gain power for himself, and that's quite clear from his history. The American voter has a very short memory, though, which is why these tyrants keep coming back even after leaving in disgrace.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
"You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."
Clinton was impeached. Impeach != removed from office
You may consult dictionary.com if you do not know the correct meaning of the word "impeach".