Source: Sci-Tech Today
At a recent debate in Florida, Newt Gingrich
promised that "by the end of my second term we will have the first
permanent base on the moon." Sound far out? Actually, the idea of
returning to the moon and building an outpost there is not new. Until
three years ago, it was U.S. policy and billions of dollars were spent
on that idea.
Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich wants to create a lunar
colony that he says could become a U.S. state. There's his grand
research plan to figure out what makes the human brain tick. And he's
warned about electromagnetic pulse attacks leaving America without
electricity.
To some people, these ideas sound like science fiction. But mostly they are not.
Several science policy experts say the former House speaker's ideas are
based in mainstream science. But somehow, Gingrich manages to make them
sound way out there, taking them first a small step and then a giant
leap further than where other politicians have gone.
Gingrich's promise that "by the end of my second term we will have the
first permanent base on the moon" got amped up in a recent debate in
Florida, which lost thousands of jobs with the end of the space shuttle
program. By then, the lunar base had become a colony and even a
potential state, and his moon ideas were ridiculed by rival Mitt Romney.
Returning to the moon and building an outpost there is not new. Until
three years ago, it was U.S. policy and billions of dollars were spent
on that idea.
Staying on the moon dates at least to 1969, when a government committee
recommended that NASA first build a winged, reusable space shuttle
followed by a space station and then a moon outpost. In 1989, President
George H.W. Bush proposed going to the moon and staying there.
Sixteen years later, in 2005, his son, President George W. Bush,
proposed a similar lunar outpost, phased out the space shuttle program
and spent more than $9 billion designing a return to the moon program.
George Washington University space policy director Scott Pace, who was
NASA's associate administrator in the second Bush administration and is a
Romney supporter, said the 2020 lunar base date Gingrich mentioned was
feasible when it was proposed in 2005.
But it is no longer, felled by funding cuts and President Barack Obama's
decision to cancel the program. Pace said it would be hard to figure
out when NASA could get back to the moon, but that such a return is
doable.
What kept killing return-to-the moon plans were the costs, starting in
1969. The proposal died 20 years later when the price tag was released:
more than $700 billion in current dollars. The second President Bush's
plans started running into problems due to insufficient funding. After a
special commission said those plans were not sustainable, Obama
cancelled the return-to-the-moon program. Instead, he ordered NASA to
aim astronauts toward an asteroid and eventually Mars, something many
space experts say is even more ambitious.
