Experts say Gingrich moon base dreams not lunacy

Not at all!

Another bunch looking for research grants.

YES!!!

Leading nations of the world are too busy fighting idiot cavemen in the desert to worry about interplanetary colonization.

Ah, Newt, your little scheme is so 1990s.

A dream of a moon base is not lunacy. Thinking it'll be good to go in 20 years is fucking balmy.

But it WILL be the 51th State of the Union !

But it WILL be the 51th State of the Union !
Puerto Rico has better chance of becoming the 51st state than there is of a moon base in 20 years

Obviously it could happen. The technology to send people to the moon is over 40 years old, and we've been living in space long-term for decades. Because there is no atmosphere on the moon, having a moon base would just involve landing something like the International Space Station on the moon. Expensive and complex, but not exactly groundbreaking.

I personally don't see any benefit in a moon base. Anything we need to do in space can be done for far less on a space station, and a centerfuge on that space station can take care of any experiments requiring the moon's gravitational acceleration.

The idea isn't lunacy. It's that it's been forwarded by such a bogus and generally despicable person like Gingrich that makes it ridiculous. Anyone else I'd listen seriously too. Gingrich though, the wannabe king of the Know Nothing Party? No damn way.

What I don't get is why Newt, if he was trying to jerk-off Florida voters with the promise of space-program dollars, chose a Moon-base as his project. Why didn't he announce a manned Mars mission? That's at least a dream-large fantasy that could rally some Kennedy-esque support. But the Moon? The Moon's old news. Hell, even a re-vamped, next generation shuttle-type program would be more likely to generate support than for a Moon-base. Republicans are tight-fisted and you might sell them on a dream but you'll never sell them a white elephant. A base on the Moon just sounds useless and silly, a project without a purpose.

The idea in itself is not lunacy. The fact he thinks he can do it by 2020, is. Then again, he is a lunatic, so what exactly did we expect?

He's not a lunatic in the same vein that Perry, Santorum, and even Ron Paul are. Gingrich is more of a corrupt egomaniac than anything else. The effective result of a Gingrich presidency, once it was all over, would be that the US would have had to endure through the most corrupt and scandal-ridden administration since Nixon, or even Warren Harding.