Gingrich proposed doing this without increasing NASA’s budget. Instead, he’d transform the agency’s culture, rely heavily on private industry and leverage American ingenuity. He said he’d use 10 percent of the NASA budget — which would amount to nearly $2 billion a year — to create prizes, incentives for entrepreneurs to achieve spaceflight milestones.You thought that the Apollo 15 Space Stamp debacle was bad, just wait until we have craft built by the lowest bidder carrying anyone willing to spend a few million to become an astronaut.
Newt has in the past suggested that the moon base be made the 51st state (which, uh, would require that it have a population of ~550,000 people....)Could you please explain why it would require that?
As broad as Gingrich’s third world war may be, it’s not the only conflict he envisions. Is there a Communist regime still in existence, however nominal or vestigal its relation to communism? Gingrich wants to intervene there, too. And Russia and China, he’s argued, are also at war with the United States.posted by symbioid at 3:54 PM on January 27 [2 favorites]
Take Cuba, a dictatorship that gave up any plausible threat to the U.S. when the Soviet Empire collapsed. At the Republican debate on Monday, Gingrich said the U.S. should use “appropriate covert operations” in order “aggressively to overthrow the regime.” This is even after Fidel Castro’s health has rendered him a null factor; and 50 years after a certain climactic covert operation with the same mission created one of the U.S.’s worst Cold War donnybrooks.
Last month, Gingrich said that Russia and China’s online economic espionage represents “the equivalent of acts of war.” That didn’t merit a bombing campaign, but Gingrich thinks the U.S. should consider responding in kind: “[L]ook, there are games we’re not going to tolerate being played. And we either need an armed truce or we’re going to engage as aggressively as you are.” (He’s also warned that “the Chinese James Bond” is “trying to hack into an American defense-industrial company.”)
Then there’s North Korea, whose missile threat Gingrich has warned about for decades. In 2009, ahead of a (failed) long-range missile launch, Gingrich demanded that President Obama should take “whatever preemptive actions are necessary” to blow the missile up. It wasn’t even the first time Gingrich issued that call. Three years earlier, in an op-ed, Gingrich argued that the military “should destroy” that very same missile, the Taepodong-2, “on its site before it is launched. Our ability to preempt the launch is nearly certain.” His preferred means to destroy it: lasers.
Newt says you'd only need 13,000 to petition for statehood.Newt actually said something like "I think the number is 13,000". I find it likely that he was simply misremembering the 30,000 mentioned in the Constitution, which I referred to in my previous comment.
The best examples come from a famous floor statement Gingrich made on March 21, 1986. This was right in the middle of the fight over funding for the Nicaraguan contras; the money had been cut off by Congress in 1985, though Reagan got $100 million for this cause in 1986. Here is Gingrich: “Measured against the scale and momentum of the Soviet empire’s challenge, the Reagan administration has failed, is failing, and without a dramatic change in strategy will continue to fail. . . . President Reagan is clearly failing.” Why? This was due partly to “his administration’s weak policies, which are inadequate and will ultimately fail”; partly to CIA, State, and Defense, which “have no strategies to defeat the empire.” But of course “the burden of this failure frankly must be placed first on President Reagan.”This was, as we all know, before Ronald Reagan single-handedly defeated the Soviet Union forever, which you'd think would've impressed Newt to some degree, but no. He's still smarting over this, poor lil marshmallow guy.
@GuyEndoreKaiser: Gingrich claims we'll have a moon base by his 2nd term. Do you know how hard it is to craft a sentence where moon base isn't the crazy part?And from the Daily Show:
I see what’s going on here -- this isn’t about making new states. 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!posted by Rhaomi at 4:04 PM on January 27 [13 favorites]
1) A platform for space telescopes. The Hubble space telescope has gotten us tons of great images and really enhanced our knowledge both with quasars and the creation of stars. The Pillars of creation are more then just a pretty picture, they also show stars being formed from cosmic dust, something that was suspected to occur but now we have pictures of it happening. On the moon you could plant a ton of scopes and maintain them much more easily.That said, I personally think that the ISS should be fine for hosting telescopes, and I don't really think manned space exploration is a good use of resources at this point in time anyway. We should be sending out LOTS of probes. I think we can get a lot more science done.
2) Staging ground for deeper trips into space. If you want to go to mars, it would be a good starting point. Guys like Neal DeGrasse Tyson are always going on about the need for manned space exploration. I haven't watched that particular video but he's always going on about it. here he is on Maher's show
"We need to solve our problems on earth."That's like saying the 3rd world shouldn't be getting OLPCs or those new cheap Indian tablets, they should be working on getting clean water not helping people get online. The reality is, they can do both. And like I said, space programs serve as economic stimulus.
I feel like this is less of a "Lets go to space" thing, and more of a "This is how the 'free market' fixes things" argument. He's just using space-travel because it's, I dunno...politically attractive?This isn't about the free market. Newt has Zero principles. He's been attacking Romney for being an out of touch capitalist, which ordinarily the republicans idolize. If he's saying he wants an X-prize, he'd still need to fund it directly.
You know, as Heinlein pointed out in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, anyone with a moon base has the absolutely commanding position in a war. If you get annoyed with someone, lifting rocks out of the lunar gravity well is cheap, and they turn into insanely devastating weapons when dropped from 250,000 miles up. If big enough, they become the equivalent of nukes...It may take less energy to get things off the moon, but where do you get the energy? Even if it requires 100x effort to get things launched off the earth, energy is probably at least 10,000x cheaper. And anyway, the U.S. and Russia built enough nukes and ICBMs to annihilate most of the human race from right here on earth, so it's not like we're somehow short on destructive capability.
A now mostly-dead technology - Hydraulic logic Fluid Logic - was created because no one knew if silicon would work in space due to radiation.Most automatic transmissions use a complex system of valves that basically amount to an analog hydrolic computer. In any event all the major space missions used electronic computers.
What else has 2.77% of the total federal budget right now? Well, under the 2012 proposed Obama budget, that's the entire cost of federal spending on education and job training.Ugh. Education is paid for mostly by the states. total funding for education in the U.S was $972 billion in 2007. That year, the federal budget was $2.73 trillion. So spending on education was equal to 35.6% of the federal budget. Far more then the 2.77% figure you quoted. By the way, we actually spend more on public sector education in this country then we do on the military.
And about 400,000 employees. Hmm. In other words, most of the population of Atlanta.Well, given there are about ~10% or 30 million people unemployed right now, that's not much (the official unemployment rate way undercounts, by the way. It's only people currently looking for work, not people who have given up looking because they can't find a job - the current rate is 8.5% = 25.5 million). We have over a million people in the army, why not dedicate that many people to advancing the human race? It would require training that many people in science and engineering, as we did in the 1960s. Which in turn helped fuel the technological boom in the latter half of the decade.
You can find pretty much every species of poll in Florida right now.posted by Rhaomi at 6:48 PM on January 28
There are traditional polls and automated polls, Internet polls and partisan polls, academic polls and commercial polls.
There are polls where voters checked a box. There are polls that were reported on Fox.
There are polls that called the voter’s house. There are polls where voters clicked a mouse.
Though the numbers were here and there, the outcome was the same everywhere.
Unless there is a major glitch, Mitt Romney will beat Newt Gingrich.
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posted by hellojed at 2:58 PM on January 27 [6 favorites]