Santorum’s ad:”“Reckless spending has led to $15 trillion of national debt. And what does Newt Gingrich suggest? Spending half a trillion dollars ($500 billion) on a moon colony.”
FACTCHECK:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFdr81Uttgg
Gingrich did not give a cost analysis of his lunar base proposal. The only figure he has given was $5 billion out of the actual NASA budget, as prize to be given to the first private group to establish a lunar base.
The Constellation program, which would have involved a human return to the moon by 2020, a lunar base thereafter, and eventually expeditions to Mars and to Earth approaching asteroids was estimated by NASA, according to a General Accounting Office report, to cost $97 billion through 2020. However the report suggested that NASA did not actually know how much Constellation would have ultimately cost. The GAO made some recommendations for NASA to refine the Constellation program to arrive at a more accurate cost estimate.
The Center for Strategic and International Studies suggested that the cost of a lunar base would be $35 billion under the Constellation program, including the development of the Altair lander, lunar habitation modules, and the costs of two Ares V launches to deploy the base. Operation costs of the base, which would have four people, would be just over $7 billion a year, to be shared by international partners.
Atlanta, GA — Newt 2012 National Security Advisor Stephen Yates shared the following statement in response to Senator Rick Santorum’s criticism of Newt Gingrich’s American space policy:
“I am deeply concerned that Senator Santorum so easily relinquishes space development to the Chinese and Russians.
“American success in space is not only about being the first to develop a station on the moon. It is just as much about the explosion of math, science, engineering and national security technology that will launch America into a new age of innovation and prosperity.
“We owe it to ourselves to set grandiose goals and then achieve them. It is the American way.”
If you are saying that Gingrich did not say he’d spend $500 billion on a moon colony, I totally agree. This is typical of campaign commercials, they take the ITEMS people propose, and look around for independent cost analysis for the proposal, and use that as if the candidate was really going to implement the proposal.
I think it’s more reasonable to say that Newt wants to encourage space exploration, and a moon colony is a great idea to do so, but he doesn’t expect to actually build a moon colony in our lifetime, because it would be way too expensive. And no private group is going to do it right now, because it wouldn’t come close to being cost-effective in any way.