Gingrich moon talk in the right direction

Last week I wrote about Newt Gingrich's meteoric rise to the top of the heap in the Republican contest for the presidential nomination. I argued that major media sources, enthralled with the story they were seeing unfold, had played soft with Gingrich, failing to properly examine his rhetoric and rolling over when it came to pressing him on his many contradictions. I thought this would continue for a while, probably such that Gingrich would win the Florida primary and continue to make the primaries interesting for a while.

Well, someone at CNN clearly must have read my column, because at last Thursday's debate in Jacksonville, the weak-willed John King was replaced by a (relatively) stoic and uncompromising Wolf Blitzer, who stood firm in his questioning of Gingrich as well as of Mitt Romney.

This change-up, combined with the debate's unusual requirement for the audience to stay silent, gave us a Gingrich bereft of his rhetorical surety. He needed to win the debate to have a chance in Florida this Tuesday, but in fact he did just the opposite. After a week of some of the most negative campaigning in primary history, Romney won the Florida contest by a resounding margin, beating Gingrich 46 percent to 32 percent. For now it looks as though this dark horse is done for.

So here, as always at the risk of jumping the gun, I would like to eulogize the campaign of Newt Gingrich 2012. Loud, abrasive, logically inconsistent, but often fascinating, just like the man behind it. As its relevancy ebbs away over the coming months, it will be missed.

But while I'm writing, I'd like to take the opportunity to say that, as much as I abhor most of the things Newt Gingrich stands for, there is one single thing I appreciate about him: Newt Gingrich is a space cadet.

I use the words "space cadet" complimentarily even though I know that's not how it's usually applied, sort of like how Gingrich in the past couple of weeks has come to embrace being called "grandiose" and turn it into a positive attribute at recent debates and campaign rallies.

At these events Gingrich has been addressing questions about the state of the country's fitfully active but laggard space program with a jolt of astronomical inspiration. He has called for private-public partnerships, a series of accomplishment prizes, and the installation of a permanent colony on the moon. He alluded to China as a competitor along the lines of the Soviet Union in the 1960s, and said to Fox News, "we lack a romantic vision of being an American."

While it's tempting to chalk this new space fixation up to the fact that Gingrich is in Florida, the heart of space exploration in the United States, bear in mind we are talking about a man who has co-written several alternate history novels and defined himself as "leader of the civilizing forces." I don't think this is just pandering we're seeing here.

Gingrich's opponents and critics alike have been quick to dismiss his ideas as prohibitively expensive and, well, grandiose. Rick Santorum ascribed Gingrich's motivations to "crass politics" and Mitt Romney told voters that if a subordinate came to him with such outlandish ideas, he'd say, "‘You're fired.'" Ron Paul, ever the clever libertarian, said, "I don't think we should go to the moon. I think we should send some politicians there sometimes."

Given current political realities, Gingrich's specific call for a moon base by 2020 probably is unrealistic. There is, however, support within the academic field for lunar settlements, as pointed out last week by The New Republic. Just a few incentives for renewed lunar exploration (and further ventures outside the Earth in general) include the unlocking of new natural resources including water and minerals (known as in situ resource utilization), advancement in human contamination studies, near-perfect astronomical observatory conditions and, in spite of high initial investment costs, the promise of long-term self-sustainability and the creation of a jumping-off point for Mars and other ambitious solar system missions.

The need to make substantial progress in space exploration, though these days the cause is lucky to attract even the scarcest media attention, is urgent and only intensifying. Booming emerging market economies and the rise of a global middle class are bearing down harder than ever on the Earth's natural resources, and many of the materials we currently take for granted in developed countries are estimated to run out within decades; according to UK geologist Hazel Pritchard, cited in a 2007 New Scientist article, terrestrial reserves of indium, tantalum, gallium, antimony and zinc––all commonly used in modern technology such as LCD televisions, solar fuel cells, fluorescent light bulbs, etc—could be depleted within 25 years, and will become increasingly difficult to mine leading up to that point.

Furthermore, certain rarely occurring resources are tied up in gruesome regional conflicts, such as the coltan used in cell phones, which has traditionally come from the war-torn Democratic Republic of the Congo and is mined by coerced and exploited workers.

If we want standards of living to keep increasing for people around the world while respecting humanitarian ethics and bearing in mind the economics of mining, we will need to find ways to make up the coming mineral and metal deficit. Space is positively full of resources that—with a great deal of focused research and development, including cooperation between the private and public sectors—will become increasingly cost-efficient to tap into.

Unfortunately the recent history of the U.S. space program, once the standard-bearer for American innovation and an inspiration for millions to enter scientific fields of study, has been marked by stagnancy and stop-start action hobbled by tight budgetary constraints, with NASA often switching visions as it struggles with the problem of how to use its limited funds most effectively.

Measured for inflation, the budget for NASA has been stuck in the $15 to 20 billion neighborhood for the past 25 years, and as a share of overall federal expenditures it has plummeted from the levels allocated during the height of Apollo in the mid-1960s.

There have been a few promising programs over the years, including the Constellation human spaceflight project created after the Columbia disaster with the mission of replacing the space shuttle with a new breed of vehicle.

Since 2004, however, Constellation encountered deadline slippage and cost overrun, and last year the program was unceremoniously eliminated in the 2011 federal budget. Meanwhile timelines for key objectives, such as the development of the Orion multi-purpose crew vehicle, the return of Americans to the moon and an eventual foray to Mars, have been pushed back repeatedly for decades. Is there not something sad about the fact that the last American moon landing was in 1972, and that 40 years later American astronauts, if they want to get into space, must book a ride on a Russian ship?

Before his inauguration in 2009, President Barack Obama and his transition team held a series of meetings on how to construct what would become his signature economic stimulus. Presented with small-bore proposals he could not find inspirational, Obama told his team (as reported in Ron Suskind's 2011 best seller Confidence Men), "We need more moon shot."

Back in those heady post-election days when everything seemed possible, Obama was looking for a way to make the little bits and pieces of his stimulus transform into something that made the whole more than the sum of its parts—a unifying theme, or perhaps a grand national project right out of the Eisenhower or Kennedy eras that would have helped to combat the dismal psychological realities of what was still an economy in free fall.

I don't think Newt Gingrich was correct when he said we lack a "romantic vision of being an American." In fact, I think the attitude he was expressing here may be what ultimately consigned him and his campaign to defeat. Gingrich has a very well-defined vision of what it means to be an American. But many of his definitions are so polarizing and divisive that he'd never make it as a candidate in a general presidential campaign. Despite his ambitions, he will never be a "leader of the civilizing forces," not by a long shot. But, credit where credit is due, he recognized the importance of this piece of the American consciousness.

Gingrich understands how deeply space exploration, led by NASA, came to embed itself in the American culture in the 20th century, and, like President Obama, he knows there is a void that must somehow be filled.

—Lane Kisonak '13 is a political science major. He is Opinions Editor for The Miscellany News.