Newt Gingrich is getting a lot of ink, photons, & pixels with his “promise” to Cape Canaveral area folks that he’s going to establish a permanent American colony on the moon, concluding his pitch with the following Gingrichian flourish: “When they have 13,000 Americans living on the moon,they can petition to become a state.”
Over at Slate, Dave Weigel calls this “not actually crazy,” which as a political pander it isn’t, since life at the Cape has been getting awfully slow, now that the realities of manned space flight—the main realities being that it’s 1) absurdly expensive, 2) absurdly dangerous, and 3) absurdly useless—have started to sink in. It was fun, back in the day, to waste $20-$30 billion a year on a program that did nothing but spend money and endanger the lives and sanity of half a dozen astronauts, but that was then and this is now, and the now reality is that Cape Canaveral needs a bailout as much as Detroit ever did, the difference being that it isn’t going to get one.
But reality never slows a good politician down. An actual permanent colony on the moon, of twenty or thirty people, would surely cost a $100 billion a year—more if you figure in the coffins. A Newt-sized colony would surely edge north of $1 trillion, which suggests, to me, that it isn’t going to happen.
Afterwords
I do have one question for Newt: If a moon colony with 13,000 inhabitants can become a state, why can’t the District of Columbia get a Congressman? (Answers involving food stamps or toilets not acceptable.)
P.S. I apologize for the sexist language here—“manned” and “Congressman”—but neither “humaned” nor “personed” sounds right to me, and “Representative” doesn’t have the same ring as “Congressman.”
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