motherjones.com

Newt’s stumping for votes from the Florida “space coast”, and throwing out a popular idea about tech challenges as bait. With the anti-science GOP backing him, it’s highly doubtful that he could get anything like this accomplished even if the long shot candidate were elected. [e.g. I would say that his election to president is somewhat less likely than established moon bases in the first half of this century…]

Newt Gingrich launched a Twitter frenzy on Wednesday when he delivered a major policy address on space at a Holiday Inn in Cocoa, Florida. Gingrich promised to complete a manned lunar colony on the moon by the end of his second term—January 2021—and set aside 10 percent of NASA’s budget for prizes that would encourage entrepreneurs and inventors to experiment on their own. It’s a side of Gingrich we’ve seen flashes of on the campaign trail, but now he’s boldly going where he’s never gone before—or at least not in a long, long time.

Before he was a presidential candidate, extraordinarily well-compensated historian, Speaker of the House, or really anyone of importance in Washington, DC, Gingrich was totally obsessed with space travel. He sponsored the Fundamental Space Act of 1984, which offered a path to statehood for future space colonies (the bill died in committee). That same year, he authored his first book, Window of Opportunity, to put forth his thoughts on how best to conquer the final frontier. (The cover features a giant bald eagle flapping its wings over the planet.) As sci-fi author Jerry Pournelle put it in the introduction: “It’s raining soup and Newt Gingrich has the blueprints for soup bowls.”