Say what else you will about Gingrich, he certainly has the right idea regarding the American space program: it needs to kick ass. Yesterday he suggested that the US could, should and would have a moon base by the end of his second term.
Of course, the naysayers came out:
Space experts ground Gingrich moon plan
“A lunar base by 2020 is a total fantasy,” John Logsdon, professor emeritus at George Washington University’s Space Policy Institute
Well, no. The claim by Lodsdon is that an eight year timeframe to get a lunar base going is infeasible because it took us that long to get Apollo onto the moon, and the US was spending 4% of the FedGuv budget to do so, while today it’s well under 1%. But the logic is flawed for several reasons:
1) Apollo was starting from a position of technical ignorance; what they learned, we now know.
2) Apollo was busy building infrastructure… infrastructure that is in place.
3) Percentage rates for a program like this are irrelevant; to replicate Apollo down to the finest detail today would not require 4% of the FedGuv budget.
4) Too many people assume that the only way to run a program like this would be to shovel vast sums of money into NASA. There are better approaches. Simply offer $100 billion to the first American program that accomplishes a lunar base. Boeing will go for it. Lockheed will go for it. Virgin Galactic/Scaled Composites will go for it. Microsoft, Apple, Disney, Trump and Coca Cola will probably go for it. Let them use NASA facilities and expertise in the same way the American aeronautical industry used the NACA back in the pre-NASA days.
As Neil deGrasse Tyson said: “The naysayers out there are not the engineers, they are people who deeply understand the political system and recognise that certain conditions might not be possible given a particular climate.”
So… listen to the engineers. Ask them how *they’d* do it… in cahoots with entrepreneurs.