Post 8: Wherein finally SPACE

Samuel here.

First thing is first! Simon and I keep noticing a very large spike in pageviews on midnight on the days when we update. That is SUPER gratifying, because it means that people are actually hanging around the site when it is supposed to update. What it also means is that we can't slack off and upload, say, 58 minutes late because we slept for 2 hours last night and had to start and finish 2 problem sets today around an ordinary day of classes. So rest assured that that sort of thing doesn't happen around here! No, sir! Also, I'm sorry. Now, on to the meaty stuff.

Did you know I like space? I like space! So when Newt Gingrich recently announced he wanted a base on the moon by 2020, I got pretty excited. I have spent much of the past week fantasizing about Newt Gingrich's space policy winning him a landslide victory in Florida, forcing Romney and Obama to both adopt daring plans to spend lots and lots of money on stuff I think is cool. While I'm not exactly holding out for that, I would like to discuss why I think Gingrich wanting a moon colony is super awesome. The person who wrote this status didn't exactly give me a lot of meaty opposition to sink my teeth into, so I get to be a bit freer with my structure this time around. But I will address the comments at the end.

I'm not going to discuss in this article why I think that space exploration and colonization are necessary, because I simply don't have enough time or space; I am essentially building my life around that philosophy, so I would like to give it a little more room than a weekly blog post allows for. So, for the sake of this post, let me take the axiom that space exploration and colonization are both desirable.

                                                                                                             

Anyone who thinks that space policy is the most important aspect of this election should be out campaigning for Newt Gingrich right now. Every other candidate's space policy sucks. Throughout this whole Republican primary, everyone but Gingrich has consistently brushed off questions about NASA by making irrelevant statements about government funding or about really, really caring about the middle class. Newt Gingrich has always taken a hard line in favour of government-led exploration and colonization of space. That impresses me a great deal. I acknowledge that his motives are different from mine; Gingrich wants to see increased space exploration because he wants to feel that America Is Great Again. But space exploration is a very, very tough line to sell. People see it as a waste of tax dollars and a waste of resources, as too abstract and complex a concept to be worth their attention. But it's very easy to sell "the Chinese are going to win". So if you can sell it that way, you sell it that way. No one disparages the moon landing for being the epitome of Cold War tensions, and we wouldn't disparage a moon base if it was the product of a bunch of old white guys being afraid of Chinese people. For such is the nature of democracy.

            "Hold on", you say, "slow down! We must immediately know why Newt Gingrich is the best candidate on space policy!"

            Good! Let's talk Republicans.

Herman Cain probably put the second-most thought into space policy. He wanted to de-fund NASA, and instead provide incentives to private corporations. But that doesn't make any sense at all. If his objection is to the government directly employing space systems engineers, he has to understand that pumping as much money into the private sector will employ just as many engineers. If he wants to cut spending, just cut the NASA budget (please don't cut the NASA budget!). If he wants nationalistic space innovation, obviously it's better for NASA to be an organ of the government. What suddenly defunding NASA would do is to take all of the people who know everything about space travel, destroy the structure within which they operate, and scatter them about the world. We would see a massive spike in space disasters from upstart companies that simply didn't have the expertise to launch craft, we would see a whole lot of way too risky business plans that would flop and take taxpayer dollars with them, and worst of all I'm not convinced we would ever see any exploration or colonization again. There is no profit incentive in exploration or research. No private company would ever have launched the Hubble Space Telescope or the International Space Station. SpaceX sure isn't going to pay to house a woman on Mars. Private companies simply perform a very different function than government-mandated ones. NASA exists for far-seeing presidents to tell the world that they want a man on the moon and they're going to get it before the end of the decade. Boeing does not take orders from the president, and it shouldn't have to.

Mitt Romney has been relentlessly jabbing at Newt Gingrich for the idea of having a moonbase by the year 2020. He claims that such elaborate schemes would be to the detriment of the U.S. economy. I am fundamentally confused by that idea. Firstly, well over $500,000,000,000 is spent annually on the American military, and the recent post-Iraq cuts of $23,000,000,000 by the Obama administration --- with the consent and encouragement of the highest ranking officers --- shows that that budget is malleable. I do not buy the argument that America lacks the funds to launch at least a barebones attempt at colonization. Secondly, where does he imagine those funds are going? The government isn't going to outsource space R&D to Kazakhstan. Newt Gingrich knew what he was doing when he announced bold plans for space just before the Florida primary. NASA cuts cost jobs in Cape Canaveral. NASA grants make jobs in Cape Canaveral. It's as simple as that. Now, I know the Republicans aren't generally the biggest proponents of Keynes, but Gingrich had no trouble playing that tune on the space coast when he made his announcement. Once again, Mitt Romney is taking the easy way out.

Rick Santorum seemingly has no opinions about space. That's like having no opinion about dinosaurs. It's like thinking that love is "pretty okay". It's like going for a walk alone late at night and all you can think about is arithmetic. I can only surmise that Rick Santorum is made of cardboard.

Ron Paul, of course, would de-fund everything. That goes against the axiom that I arbitrarily selected, so sucks to be Ron Paul in this analysis.

And I will ignore Michele Bachmann and John Huntsman and whoever else may at one point have been running, because they certainly were not memorable for their space policy.

I am also going to ignore Barack Obama for the time being, in the hopes that his space policy develops over the course of the general election. I don't like to compare actions to words, so I would like to wait to hear from him again about this first. If the Democratic party line doesn't change, though, please tune in for more whining. But let me say this, for now: I want the manned space program back.

So why do I like what Newt Gingrich has to say? Well, honestly, I don't really like it. But it's way better than most people would have you think it is. Firstly, there are few humans alive today who would not agree that the landing on the moon was one of the greatest moments in the history of our species. Let us not forget that that was, if you'll excuse the expression, totally just a shot in the dark. There was absolutely no reason for Kennedy to believe that it would be possible to place men on the moon by 1970. And yet, with sufficient political willpower and a shitload of money, they accomplished it.

Unlike the second commenter on the status, I have no trouble believing that a similar fiscal and political push would get us a permanent colony on the moon by 2020. The first commenter suggests a concrete platform, but that would require either bringing concrete there (and mixing it along the way?), or synthesizing, pouring, and moulding concrete on the moon, which is absurd at best (sorry to harp on this, but I once lost a space design contest to someone who suggested exactly that for a Mars colony). No, we easily have the technology to build a moonbase, and I have seen it myself. Basically, you just send some of these rovers to the moon and have them flatten out a spot of ground. Then you can stably land craft there. Inflate some places to live and all the rest is for the biologists to figure out. For those of you who think that the political molasses is too strong for us to fund colonization projects within our lifetime, I would like to direct you to Project Horizon and more generally to this Wikipedia article. Is it night? Are the skies clear? If so, walk outside and look up. And then you will truly understand why we can and will summon the political courage to branch out into space.

"That's all fine and dandy", you say, unaware that nobody actually speaks like that, "but there are still huge engineering problems with colonizing the moon!" Yup. Watch. We'll fix them. We always do.

"But how does that justify campaigning on that platform? We want our politicians to have vision, but not to be impractical." This is usually true. But I don't see anything wrong with wanting to do something really, really worthwhile that you aren't sure you'll be able to do. The only problem with impracticality in politics is if it could be damaging; removing social security or Medicare, for instance, is impractical. By all means, if we're making people suffer because we're colonizing the moon, then we're monsters (moonsters?). But there is absolutely no reason that Gingrich should have to hurt people in order to get to the moon.

I think that the third commenter perfectly sums up everything that was wrong with the public reaction to Gingrich's suggestion (the youtube link is a link to circus music). This is the most courageous thing I have seen anyone do in this election cycle so far, and Newt Gingrich should be applauded for trying to sell something that he believes in. I can only hope the Democratic Party picks up their tremendous slack, and --- this is hard for me to write --- follows in the footsteps of Newton Leroy Gingrich.

P.S. I'm not going to touch all that stuff he said about lunar statehood. What a nutbar.

Keep on trucking.