gadgetry asked: I'm dying to hear your thoughts on Gingrich's recent comments re: our future with space exploration (or colonization, if we're taking his tone to heart).
Okay, just to preface this, I have a visceral dislike for Gingrich. So, I am going to look at it from just the perspective of his space plan.
So, we all know that the only reason Gingrich said anything was because he was in Florida. But this something that the whole country would have to get behind, for the least to keep the political will that comes from a project this big. It would be too expensive to do it any other way. Neil Tyson has a quote that is relevant here where he said “I don’t have a problem with Gingrich’s goal. The naysayers are not the engineers. They recognize that certain ambitions might not be possible. He’s going to have to change the nation’s understanding and valuation of what it is to embark on those types of adventures.”
But G.W. Bush had an ambitious space plan with Constellation and that went nowhere.
It would be politically and economically impossible for us to have a base on the moon by 2020 under current circumstances. If China were to make significant strides towards that goal in the very near term (something that, from all industry indications it doesn’t seem possible), then maybe the political will would be there to pursue something that aggressively. From an engineering perspective, it is essentially within the realm of possibility. Not as fast as he says we can though, since we don’t even have an adequate launch vehicle to get us there. Do I think that we can have “commercial activities in space, including science, tourism, manufacturing, and a rocket capable of reaching Mars” within 8 years? No. The difference between this and JFK’s Apollo goal was that we had been building towards Apollo with Gemini and all the other previous publicly funded space efforts. JFK came in and gave us direction. What Gingrich is doing is throwing out an arbitrary goal without us even having built anything close to making that goal a reality in since 1973.
Tyson said it best on MSNBC yesterday, Apollo and JFK’s ambition goal to land on the moon was a government program. Gingrich can’t promote private enterprise as the savior and criticize the amount of money that has gone into NASA in the past 30 years, without acknowledging that the greatest successes that we have had in space exploration came as a result of the public sector. Now, this is at the beginning stages of looking like it may be different with the private space companies but no one can tell how long this will be viable. I am a huge believer in the power of entrepreneurship but I also have a strong understanding (as a result of my years in the field and graduate studies) of the complexities (mainly political and economic) in developing large-scale engineering projects. There is no incentive for private companies to advance the frontier of space, only to do just enough to make it economically attractive for them to participate. Expanding the bounds of what we know as possible, from a space perspective, only comes through research and/or public partnerships.
But mostly, I don’t agree with the James Webb space telescope not getting funded under Gingrich’s proposal. I don’t consider it a “science project” as he does. As out-of-touch as I think Newt is, I have to hand it to him for always having such a space boner all these years.
