When the Apollo mission was conceived, no one had ever been to the moon. Everything which had to be done was INVENTED, including orbital mechanics of getting beyond LEO. Out of all those inventions, which were given away, came a long list of things we take for granted today, and even “cannot live without” - cell phones for example.
Since NASA gave the invented tech away, they received little ROI, and the public perceived those new things as coming from this or that corporation's resident geniuses. No connection was made, and therefore the general pubic perceived the whole enterprise as a waste of time, money, and maybe even faked.
Sure we have been to the moon and the Chinese can use that to get there. However, no one has ever lived on the moon. All the tech necessary to live on the moon will have to be INVENTED.
As patterns go, all the tech which flows from those inventions will become common place one day.
But unlike the US, China will not give that tech away, and that is the money to be made by living on the moon.
NG may be all the things his detractors say he is, but then so it it for the other candidates as well.
I do not long for the return of days of Reagan, since I was personally screwed by his policies, but I do long for the return for the days of US manned space exploration.
And Obama and his Science and Technology Czar, John P. Holdren (”Population Bomb” and former Mitt Romney environmental adviser) are working to remove the idea of and ability for American exceptionalism and space resource exploitation, development and utilization (to them it unbalances the world when the U.S. is strong).
What you are arguing here is that we should just throw money at this project because something unforeseen "might" be invented.
That is not how a prudent capitalist uses money. That any inventions came from government spending is irrelevant. Who is to say that they wouldn't have been invented by private industry.
What this shows more than any other thing is that Newt is not serious about reducing government spending in any way.
There is no way he can cut back on entitlement funding for "the poor" and battle the entrenched interests that protect it while at the same time throwing money away on space circuses.