I keep thinking about this like a family around the table. Imagine if dad is laid off, the credit cards are maxed out, the family is almost out of savings and is having a hard time paying the mortgage. The rich uncle is tired of loaning them money. And then dad comes home one day and tells the family he has booked a vacation for Disneyland. That is what a moon base is.
Actually, it is, especially now that Obama has killed it off (seemingly). What we took for granted really has given us much in the way of collateral knowledge/technology. Newt's reiterating the dream of it (so why not dream big?) and the practicality of it (useful tech).
There's just something wrong about turning away from innovation. We may be "broke" but American brio has never paused for a balanced book. No big dreamer or achiever can afford to think in such limited terms. Risk is required.
That said, hunkering down to get our house in order is a worthy adventure in its own right. No need for all the sad-sack baloney we see everywhere. I appreciate Newt's story about George Washington and his troops' secret password: Victory or Death! We need to embrace that courageous attitude, it does not befit heirs of the Founders to whine and moan and wring hands (especially since we've had it so good for so long).
A moon base is an exciting idea. Someone should write a movie about it.
Will a TV series do? Remember Space: 1999? In that series, the Moon venture was used to make the Moon a high-tech Yucca Mountain, a place to put all the radioactive trash, to make the whole effort worthwhile. With unforeseen consequences and catastrophic results, both Moon-side and Earth-side.
If you really want to make a movie, there are several stories, from the Cold War years, describing a joint venture of multiple nations building and occupying such colonies. In the vast majority of the stories it wasn't one country in the venture, but a consortium. In 2001: A Space Odyssey the space station was multi-country, although in the same structure, and the Moon colonies were separate but dependent on each other.
Even in the Star Trek universe, the moon settlement was not the efforts of a single country, or continent.
My candidate: Heinlein's The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress. The story of the exploitation of the Moon's resources for the benefit of the Lunar Authority, a bureaucracy of the successor to the United Nations, makes for an interesting cause of a revolution.
Newt didn’t say he had “booked it”. He said he wanted to set that as a goal. Take the same family situation. The father sits at the table and says there’s going to be no way the family can get out of the situation they are in as opposed to the father who sits down and begins to make plans and goals with the understanding that things are going to be turned around to the point that goals are reachable.
I would much rather have a leader that has goals that we should strive for. Getting our house in order should be a given when goals are set. Everyone who has ever set goals understands that background support needs to be accomplished first. Anyone who does not have forward thinking plans should not be our leader.
Mitt has none of those goals in fact from what he said in the debate he would have fired Kennedy and we would never have had a space program which gave us multiple products from the research and made the US a proud and successful nation.