While Newt Gingrich sings the swansong of developing an American lunar colony by 2020, rational observers and folks in the political sphere are left adrift, wondering about the future of manned spaceflight and specifically, NASA.
Newt’s idea highlights his dissent into madness from the height of power in Washington as a well-respected historian with a PhD to a trolling GOP candidate throwing out ideas that would waste taxpayer money on a superfluous project and distract from critical issues.
Newt’s suggestion of a lunar moon base by the end of his second term as president is political pandering at its best; he merely floated this idea to try and gain traction with Florida’s voters because the space industry is so vast in the state. His maneuver is less about John F. Kennedy-style space exploration and exceptionalism and more about petty party politics.
While one President sought to galvanize our national character and cement our nation’s destiny as a leader in space, the other failed candidate threw out a kooky, wacky idea seeking to galvanize his zany base of Republican supporters. While the Georgia Republican’s plans may be ridiculous, revitalizing NASA is not. In fact, it ought to be a priority for Obama’s Republican replacement in 2013.
Obama’s record on spaceflight, a lofty dream of the country for years, is dismal at best and bleak at worst. The New York Times stated in a February 2010 article that “In place of the Moon mission, Mr. Obama’s vision offers, at least initially, nothing in terms of human exploration of the solar system.
What the administration calls a ‘bold new initiative’ does not spell out a next destination or timetable for getting there.” When even a supportive, left-of-center newspaper demagogues the President’s decision, one can clearly see the problem here: America needs to re-frame the argument on space.
We need to reposition ourselves not only as preeminent global leaders but as visionaries. We need to make the issues about not only the future of our program, but the future of manned spaceflight worldwide and the progress of mankind into the “final frontier.”
This national zeitgeist is precisely what Kennedy summed up in one of the most eloquent and inspirational speeches of the 20th Century: “We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.”
The America of our forebears does not do things halfway, nor do we abandon our dreams because small-minded cynics deem them “unrealistic.” We conquer any challenge presented not because of its simplicity, but because it is difficult. We are innovators and revolutionaries of the mind.
When we look at NASA from a 2012 perspective, however, we recognize two fundamental notions, however. One is that NASA has to be part of the commonsense constraints on our budgets. With excess spending strangling progress and economic recovery, the American space program must dream big dreams within a reasonable budget. Unless we prioritize and re-allocate spending, nothing can get done. The final element is that we must make NASA an apolitical issue. This is more about America’s future than winning an election or ensuring some candidate gets elected.
In the long record of man’s progress from the swamps to the skies, manned spaceflight stands as a unique monolith to the testament of dreams, hard work and cooperation. We are taking our place as beings leaving our home and exploring our cosmic surroundings. We must reverse the mistaken Obama decision and make NASA a priority again, just not our top national spending priority.
