COMMENTARY | According to Space.com, Republican candidate Newt Gingrich is saying that, if elected president, he will see to it that the United States has a manned colony on the moon by 2020. He also said that commercial spaceflight would be bustling and a next-generation propulsion system will have the nation sending astronauts to Mars.
It all sounds very cool. Until you realize, of course, that there are massive problems here at home, not the least of which is the two opposing sides of the political field being unable to agree on anything. Not to be the Negative Nellie here, but as it stands, America can't approve a pipeline from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico. America can't figure out if it wants government-mandated health care or not. America can't deal with immigration, it can't completely fund the services it's offering to its citizens and it can't pay its bills.
But the space program can pay for itself through commercial spaceflights. Really? First the government will have to come up with a series of regulations on the industry. Then it will have to sit through lawsuits, because you know there are going to be lawsuits. The BLM can't lease lands for oil and gas or solar facilities without lawsuits. Private companies can't build a nuclear plant without lawsuits. But we're going to load up a bunch of humans on a machine that is going to blast them to the atmospheric fringe of near-space using some sort of fuel and emitting who knows what, which will undoubtedly cause frightened animals and melted ice caps and more lawsuits.
American colonies on the moon? It's the wonderful, imaginative stuff of decades-worth of movies and books. But I just think there's enough here at home to worry about until at least 2020.
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