Is Newt Better Off-Earth Than On It?
Gingrich: Terrible President on Earth, Great One in Space, opinion, Huffington Post
“Take just about any issue on Earth and I disagree vehemently with Newt Gingrich’s policy position. His disingenuous expressions of anti-elitimism infuriate me daily, and his runaway hypocrisy embodies everything that’s wrong with the political process. But the man said he was going to build a moon base, and for that, he’s just about got my vote.”
Tea Party in Space Endorses Gingrich for President
“Mr. Gingrich’s bold announcement of a moon base by 2020 is not unrealistic like some would have Americans believe,” Gasser continued. “Newt brings the kind of leadership lacking at NASA while the other candidates want to continue the status quo. This isn’t the 1960s and 70s where ‘only NASA’ could build rockets and space stations. Today the private sector has more than proven that if you remove the shackles of government bureaucracy, American ingenuity will flourish.”
“For technologically minded youth of my generation, the space program has been nothing but a series of missed opportunities. Each time NASA let one of the space shuttle’s external fuel tanks burn up in the atmosphere instead of giving it the little extra boost that would have kept it in orbit and let it be a building block for a huge space station, I’d burn up a little bit too.”
Same here, and it’s not just your generation but at least the two preceding it that are disappointed. Many of us now expect to die before humanity achieves anything important beyond LEO; you at least will be able to witness what we wished for in the 1970s.
Obama had great things to say about the space program when he was in Florida, too. Now we don’t have human spaceflight capabilities. All just political grandstanding.
Maybe we should send Romney, Paul, and Santorum back to the stone age since they have so much hostility towards America’s scientific and technological future in space:-)
What is wanted is a grander vision for HSF. Bush’s spiral’s then VSE, Obama’s FY2011 – didn’t make the cut. Newt’s is causing them to react.
Since we’ve concluded Shuttle, we’re behind the 8 ball.
The terrific irony is that Florida, a “space state” if there ever was such a thing … isn’t reacting to Newt’s vision but the tepid “bought off” one of a pandering, disingenuous Romney vision of VSE without moon occupancy.
So in Florida, it’s not about HSF vision but about being paid off – how appropriate then the candidacy of Romney, someone who’s been a “Chainsaw Al” at a massive level. Having worked around theses guys, the thing you fear is … will they keep their deals?
A Gingrich does so because he has a long held interest in space. One can be wary of that, as Newt’s long held beliefs have seemed to change at times given the past.
But Romney’s “revisions” are at a more faster pace … as if he constantly tests the market for what it will bear. People used to get upset that Bill Clinton would similarly test the popularity of things before choosing what to do.
So what is the US about? It doesn’t look like “vision”. And while one can nostalgically pander selling the past without meaning it, the reality of what can be financed/built/operated is nothing like what we did in the past – because when we had more, we still couldn’t fund/design/create/fly.
When will we stop collectively lying to ourselves?
Seth Borenstein just posted a pretty good AP article that puts Newt’s moon base ideas in historical perspective.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynami…