Candidate Gingrich Pushes a Moon Base, Other Space Initiatives 602
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.
Re:Going to the moon, with what money?? (Score:5, Interesting)
Wow, I mean wow... (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Bigger governmnet (Score:5, Interesting)
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".
Re:What could a moonbase do? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
USA has 11 aircraft carriers (Score:5, Interesting)
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
Re:Going to the moon, with what money?? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Going to the moon, with what money?? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Going to the moon, with what money?? (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, this is the main point. The argument will be that it is inconvenient for some people to have to change states. The counter argument is "that's better than having to change countries".
Re:Back to the future (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Going to the moon, with what money?? (Score:2, Interesting)
We'll use all he money we're saving by taking apart he military industrial and the prison industrial complexes. hen we can launch all the jingoists to the moon where they can live in a perfect capitalist society where they don't have to live the evils of capitalism.
Re:Going to the moon, with what money?? (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm all for paying less in taxes. Who isn't? But you can't lower revenue before you lower spending (*). Even if "starve the beast" worked, you'd still be left with the old debt still on the books. To use the simplistic home budget analogy, if you are in debt and want to get out, you have to keep working overtime until the debt is paid off, not just until you can afford the minimum payments. You can't spend what you don't have, sure, but you also can't pretend that your past debts don't exist. You have to keep earning more than you need until the debt is paid off.
Also, not all federal debt is a bad thing. The Treasury needs to be able to issue temporary debt to keep the money flowing. You know who is the biggest holder of US debt? US citizens. A couple trillion of it is in Social Security holdings, and then there are the bonds held by citizens and businesses as savings. Further, if you look at it from a very macro level, the debt is a way for us to get our money back. Think about it: we buy foreign goods. They give us stuff, we give them dollars. They use those dollars to buy our stuff, and when they have bought all the stuff they can handle, they still have some dollars left over. They can't use dollars, so they give them back to us in exchange for pieces of paper (bonds). So the US has their stuff, AND we get our dollars back. They will only start reversing the flow when they need dollars for something, and that can really only be to buy more of our stuff. So we would STILL get our dollars back. It's not as bad as people make it out to be.
(*) And government spending doesn't just disappear. Every dollar they spend goes into someone's pocket. Some of it is "wasteful" in that it lines the pockets of the owners of the big contractors, but much of it goes into people's paychecks. Less spending means fewer jobs. Eventually, hopefully, that would work out as those laid off workers retrain and get other jobs. But the friction in that process means that in the meantime, there will be more people in the unemployment lines, and more people competing for a relatively fixed number of private sector jobs. Being more experienced means that they will probably get more of those jobs, meaning that the more entrenched jobless remain jobless, putting further pressure on social services, further dampening the "savings" of the lower spending. I don't know if it would even be break-even, budget-wise. Even if it was, they would be saving a little money to the detriment of many citizens. The time to reduce spending is not when unemployment is high.
Re:USA has 11 aircraft carriers (Score:4, Interesting)
They're very relevant [cbpp.org]. Ending the Bush tax cuts would cut the deficit to less than half of what it is, and given the current activities of the "job creators" whom it would effect, it would have next to no impact on the economy. They're not spending that money creating jobs. Do you know what they're doing with that money? They're loaning it back to the government and charging interest on the loan. That's exactly how stupid the Bush tax cuts are.
Re:Going to the moon, with what money?? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Going to the moon, with what money?? (Score:4, Interesting)
Right! And all state/locally funded. Once the feds get involved, things tend to go downhill
So you're OK with Socialism, just not the US Federal governments involvement in socialism? If so, you should really make that more clear.
OK, but I could use N. Korea or the former Soviet Union as counter examples
Neither of which were ever true socialist states. They took a lot more socialist ideals, but the whole concept of socialism, or to the farthest reaches of true-communism, is that there is NO central authority. In reality, that never occurs. Someone will always take power, and typically the person most willing to do so is the person you least likely want to have it.
Power corrupts. When you make the government all powerful, which is necessary for true Socialism, corruption happens.
And the exact same thing can be said for the free markets. With out the stablising force of a strong government, a free market will eat itself and collapse. See the 1920's, 1980's, 2000's, and we'll probably see it again by the 2030's.
Some would say that's why we have the world's largest economy by far. We certainly have the most production per capita of any nation in history, and we are a lazy lot.
A rank that won't be ours for much longer. The BRIC countries are expanding at such a rate that by 2020 we will no longer hold either of those records.
-Rick