Newt Gingrich's Space Oddity

Ground control to Major Newt: Your proposal to build a colony on the moon has subjected you to ridicule and accusations that you’re pandering to voters on Florida’s Space Coast. Don’t worry about that—take your protein pills and put your helmet on, and keep giving us those big ideas!

Newt Gingrich took some hits last night from his rivals for the Republican presidential nomination over his proposal to build a colony on the moon.

“If I had a business executive come to me and say I want to spend a few hundred billion dollars to put a colony on the moon, I’d say, ‘You’re fired,” said Mitt Romney.

(There Mitt goes again—showing everybody how much he likes to fire people.)

Comedian Jon Stewart had a different take on Gingrich’s moon colony proposal: “Newt Gingrich did that global-warming ad with Nancy Pelosi, realized that the Earth is very sick, and now he wants to leave it for a younger planet.”

Gingrich’s proposal does seem counterintuitive for somebody trying to consolidate Tea Party support, since those Republicans don’t want to spend money on any new programs, much less flights of fancy.

“To go out there and promise new programs and big ideas, it’s a great thing to maybe get votes, but it’s not a responsible thing,” said Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum.

But Gingrich has an answer for these critics.

“You don’t have to be cheap everywhere,” he said. “You can actually have priorities to get things done.”

Plus, he said he’d rely on the private sector for 90 percent of this new space race. He’d take 10 percent of NASA’s budget and use it for prize money that would go to innovators who come up with ways to speed trips by Americans to the moon and Mars.

Gingrich’s proposal actually could resonate with many Americans, especially since the United States no longer has a manned space program now that the space shuttle has been retired. As Portfolio.com reported in July, a CNN/ORC International poll found that 75 percent of Americans think the U.S. should develop a replacement spacecraft capable of sending astronauts into space and back. And 54 percent said we should rely more on private companies than the government to run future space missions.

That’s already happening for trips to the International Space Station. This year, a rocket and spacecraft developed by SpaceX in Hawthorne, California, will deliver cargo to the space station.

Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic is booking future trips for suborbital space flights on its SpaceShipOne. Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen’s Stratolaunch Systems broke ground this month at the Mojave Air and Space Port for a production facility and hangar for a spacecraft that can carry payloads into space. In December, Stratolaunch announced it was developing an air-launch system for orbital space flights.

“We are at the dawn of radical change in the space launch industry,” said Allen, who co-developed Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipOne.

Gingrich is aiming high—besides a moon colony, he wants to develop rockets capable of getting to Mars by 2021.

“I am sick of being told we have to be timid, and I am sick of being told we have to be limited in technologies that are 50 years old,” Gingrich said.

By Tuesday night, however, Gingrich may come crashing back to earth. Polls show he’s likely to lose the crucial Florida primary to Romney. If that happens, his candidacy—and his big ideas—may not survive.

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Kent Hoover is the Washington bureau chief for bizjournals.