Posted on 01/26/2012 7:36:33 AM PST by The_Victor
The United States will have a permanent manned colony on the moon by 2020 if Newt Gingrich is in charge, the Republican presidential hopeful announced today (Jan. 25).
Gingrich laid out this goal during a speech in the city of Cocoa, on Florida's Space Coast. He also said that near-Earth space would be bustling with commercial activity by 2020, and that America would possess a next-generation propulsion system by then, allowing the nation to get astronauts to Mars quickly and efficiently.
"By the end of my second term, we will have the first permanent base on the moon, and it will be American," Gingrich said.
The former Speaker of the House made no apologies for the boldness of his amibitions, which depend primarily on the emergence of a vibrant commercial spaceflight industry. He said the U.S. space program needs a kick in the pants like the one President John F. Kennedy gave it in 1961, when he promised to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade.
(Excerpt) Read more at space.com ...
Wow - smoke detectors and Tang AGAIN you assume that none of this stuff would have been developed without the space program. Just not true. If there is a consumer demand for it, then it will get developed. Government funding is the least effective way to get stuff done. Just look at the difference between the post office and UPS.
You have been here since 2007 and you view me as a lib? Are you a deep plant mole? Get lost fool.
Lots of work going on in fusion, we are getting close to having a working prototype, it will happen.
Well, if large swaths of ice are found on the moon (as studies suggest), you would simply need to mine the ice and it would provide O2, water, and humans would provide the Co2 for plant growth. A preliminary base would do very well on the pole, where both solar power and ice are plentiful.
Ilmenite - which is plentiful on the moon - provides excellent titanium, iron, and oxygen when broken down.
Anthorite - also plentiful - produces silicon, calcium, and oxygen.
The only thing really missing would be nitrogen and meat. The moon, however, and the technologies created would definitely allow people to leave to other planets within a decade or so. We should have never left the moon, but we simply didn’t have the technology to have a sustained presence in the 60’s - we do now.
Me too, but freeper space kadets have a particular blind spot when it come to robbing their fellow taxpayers to see their silly pipe dreams implemented. Somehow in their minds although it's bad to pay welfare, it's good to pay for the space progam. (They also have a blind spot when it come to economics and physics)
I like his thinking, but I believe it would take us 8 years to go back there, let alone establish a ‘base’. Then again, I suppose it depends on how one would define “base”.
I see that at least one of the space kadets is not only rude but stupid and ignorant too.
You mean like when the taxpayers were robbed to buy Louisiana?
Hate to fill you in, but Jefferson had no authority to do that either.
On top of that he then spent more tax dollars to send guys out there to explore it! Then military to protect it so that freeloading businesses could exploit the territory too!
You are right. We ought to give that back and keep on our side of the Mississippi.
See post #80
By the way, I saw the Newt Gingrich speech yesterday on the C-SPAN video. I'm not a big Newt fan but his speech really impressed me. No notes, no teleprompter, yet gave a very inspiring and informative speech right off the top of his head.
Again look at the costs the Apollo program cost about $24,000,000,000 in 1970 dollars. It returned 841 lbs of rocks, and if they could have brought back more they would have. That works out to $1,783,000 per OUNCE, Titanium iron and O2 are a lot cheaper right here. If we allow for inflation, then returning moon rocks today would cost about $4.5 million per ounce. There isn't ANY raw material worth that much - in fact I'd have a hard time coming up with anything worth that much.
I imagine it would be an advantage for larger, heavier objects to be assembled from components on the moon and then launched from 1/6th the earth's gravity, and use the earth's gravity to slingshot it into the direction we wanted it to go.
Tell me what raw material is worth $4,500,000 in current dollars per ounce, and then I 'll admit that you may have a case.
see 64, I am a big fan of space exploration but my 64 lays bare the faulty thinking on display here. And not one person has attempted to refute it. So I am thinking everyone is choosing to ignore my iron clad logic on Newts’ plan.
A real man would use his own money, liberal.
You have been here since 2007 and you view me as a lib? Are you a deep plant mole? Get lost fool.
Liberal is as liberal does, liberal. Be a real man and get your hand out of my pocket.
Building basic infrastructure and doing primary research is a valid function of government.
>>>Again look at the costs the Apollo program cost about $24,000,000,000 in 1970 dollars. It returned 841 lbs of rocks, and if they could have brought back more they would have. That works out to $1,783,000 per OUNCE, Titanium iron and O2 are a lot cheaper right here. If we allow for inflation, then returning moon rocks today would cost about $4.5 million per ounce. There isn’t ANY raw material worth that much - in fact I’d have a hard time coming up with anything worth that much.
What’s the price of stifling human adventure. I’m sure it cost loads of money for both public entities to send people to the West in the 1800’s, but it was done because eventually it must be done. I’m sure the money that Lewis and Clark were paid with was “worth way too much,” but in a society where trillions are spend on subsidized health care, it might be better spend on the final frontier - space.
I don’t really think that and products are going to be returned to the Earth from a moon base - because the moonbase is itself an experiment. Because of the harsh conditions, humans need to work with living underground with only limited excursions and most work done by robotics (because of the constant solar and terrestrial wash of electrons, etc. and cosmic grays). Hell, we could live on Venus - you just have to drill deep enough and provide water, air, and food.
The biggest problem that I would see would be the children born on the moon. Would they be 8 ft tall and never able to return to earth’s oppressive gravitational field? It’s a possibility. I know everything boils down to economics in your theory, but is space travel really as much waste as the foreign aid that we pay out yearly and never returns benefit. I argue that space investment would return benefit.
Provided you actually wanted to do that, then it would be better to send them from earth orbit. You wouldn't have the added expense of getting them to the moon safely and then getting them off again. Not to mention that you'd need to boost an assembly facility from earth to the moon
Where does the Constitution authorize this? Or are you proposing an amendment?
Or are you a "living document" "conservative"?
I have a conservative idea: let's do neither.
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