Newt the "Moonie"

I would chip in to send him there.

"Newt for President — of the Moon"

You couldn't get further out in space than Gingrich's new plans for a lunar colony

by

Jeffrey Kluger

January 27th, 2012

Time

Oh, the news that was made in Florida this week. America’s manned space program is roaring back! We’re developing new kinds of rocket engines to get us to Mars in record time. We’re building airports from which five space missions can be launched every day — many of them carrying tourists. We’re going back to the moon, and not just to visit — to build a whole colony. Oh, and when that lunar colony has at least 13,000 permanent residents: Hello, 51st state!

The best part of all this? We don’t have to wait decades for the moon base to be built and the tourists to start packing. It’ll all happen by 2021 — which is otherwise known as the end of Newt Gingrich’s second term as President. According to Newt Gingrich.

Gingrich laid out his plans for the U.S.’s next decade in space during a campaign event at Brevard Community College in Florida, and to be fair, he’s hardly the first presidential candidate to talk up the local industry in a state that’s just days away from holding a primary. Still, this wasn’t just any candidate delivering just any stump speech. This was top-shelf, grade A, golden delicious Gingrich.

“I come at space from a standpoint of a romantic belief that I believe it really is part of our destiny,” the ex-Speaker said. “Does that mean I’m a visionary? You betcha. I was attacked the other night for being grandiose. I would just want you to note: Lincoln standing at Council Bluffs was grandiose. The Wright brothers standing at Kitty Hawk were grandiose. John F. Kennedy was grandiose. I accept the charge that I am grandiose and that Americans are instinctively grandiose.”

Leave aside for a moment that the professor, politician and former not-a-lobbyist for Freddie Mac either doesn’t understand that grand and grandiose are two very different things or else does understand and is copping to more delusion and fabulism than one might want in a President. The real problem is that Gingrich often doesn’t seem to get that merely being willing to say any damn thing is not the same as being able to do any damn thing, especially when the challenges you’re taking on don’t involve just political rivals and government policy but the hard laws of engineering and physics, which are a wee bit less amenable to jawboning and dealmaking.

So let’s start with those lunar bases. Living on the moon is a heck of an idea, but it’s really nice to have a reason to live there first. Some mission planners have talked about telescopes on the moon’s far side. Some have argued for lunar homesteads as a dress rehearsal for longer-term habitation of Mars. Gingrich’s reason, as expressed in his other speeches, would be lunar mining. What does the moon have that the Earth doesn’t? Helium-3 — a nonradioactive isotope of helium that would be the perfect fuel for fusion reactors. Haul enough of the stuff home, and you can break the world of its dependency on oil forever, replacing fossil fuel with a clean, safe superfuel. Best of all, the U.S. would control the supply chain — at least at first.

Great. Of course there’s the teensy problem that we still need to, you know, invent a practical fusion reactor, something we’ve never been able to do despite decades of trying. Even if one did exist, there’d be the problem of money. It costs a Russian proton rocket $2,200 to put a single pound of payload into low Earth orbit; it used to cost the shuttles a stunning $8,100. Now imagine the price tag for hauling thousands of tons of mining equipment out to the moon and thousands of tons of helium-3 back. The excavation operation itself would be no picnic either. Harrison Schmitt, the Apollo 17 lunar-module pilot, estimates that it would take 220 lb. (100 kg) of helium-3 to power a city the size of Dallas for a year, and that to collect that much, you’d have to dig a trench 0.75 miles square by 9 ft. deep (1.9 sq km by 2.7 m). If you doubt Schmitt, consider that not only was he an astronaut, he’s also a geologist and served a term as a U.S. Senator, which means that he’s played both in his own backyard and in Gingrich’s. Any wonder that helium-3 fusion is not remotely ready to pass the “net energy” test — meaning it generates more power and money than it costs?

But never mind that. The lunar Jamestown will be up and running in nine years all the same.

Then there’s the matter of Newt’s five-flights-a-day spaceports. Since the first practical rocket lofted the first practical payload, aeronautical engineers have dreamed of building what’s known as the single stage to orbit (SSTO) spacecraft, a ship that could take off and land like an airplane, shedding no stages or other parts along the way. That, of course, is the only way to fly the kind of multiple, quick-turnaround missions Gingrich envisions. But there’s a reason an SSTO has never been built: In order to lift a one-piece ship that never gets lighter by shedding parts, you need an extraordinarily powerful engine, which requires an extraordinarily big load of fuel. This, of course, adds weight, which calls for an even bigger engine and even more fuel — adding more weight still and on and on. Designers have been chasing that spiraling equation down the same engineering drain for years and have never reached bottom. The last serious attempt the U.S. made to build an SSTO was in the late 1980s, when NASA and the Air Force collaborated to build the National Aerospace Plane — a messy amalgam of ramjets, scramjets and rocket engines — before they threw up their hands and walked away.

Surely, the SSTO puzzle will one day be cracked — with a combination of lighter materials, more-efficient engines and more-energy-dense fuel all contributing to the success. But Gingrich has largely skipped this stage. The planes are queuing up by 2021, so the designers had better hurry.

Newt’s big dreams are all of a piece. He envisions a “continuous propulsion system” that will get us to Mars in a “remarkably short time.” But the only such continuous system now in operation is ion propulsion, which takes a very long time to accelerate and actually slows things down in the short term — not good at all when a crew is on board. And Gingrich steers mostly clear of figuring out how to pay for all his plans, except to say that the private sector would sort things out. It’s private, after all. And it’s, um, a sector. Isn’t that enough? Forget that the Gemini and Apollo programs that got us to the moon cost $30 billion in 1975 money, or $126 billion today. Forget that in 1989, when the first President Bush floated the idea of a manned Mars program, his budget team put the cost at $500 billion — or about $867 billion now. What could possibly induce today’s private industry to take on that kind of R&D expense with no promise of payback? Federal prize money, Gingrich says. Really.

Give Newt his props. He’s indeed an imaginative thinker. He works hard to bring science into a presidential campaign that too often ignores the topic altogether. But even at the Jan. 26 debate, he exhibited a woeful lack of either knowledge or honesty about why the manned space program has been stuck for so long. He blamed NASA for not having a heavy-lift vehicle to match the Saturn V, mockingly asking if the people at agency headquarters just sit around and “think space” all day. But NASA did have a smart plan for a heavy-lift vehicle. It was called the Ares V, and it went into design in 2005, but the plug was pulled on it in 2010 because funding was cut off. A new heavy-lift booster is now being developed to replace it, and its design, based in part on old Saturn V ideas and in part on shuttle technology, is smart, economical, and proven.

During the debate, he also doubled down on his idea that government prizes could stimulate private industry to invest in space, citing a $25,000 prize that incentivized Lindberg to fly the Atlantic. A $25,000 prize in 1927, when Lindbergh flew, would be the equivalent of $311,000 today. Think that would be enough to persuade any private company to invest another $500 billion or so?

Newt Gingrich dreams big dreams, and he has a vision — of sorts. But dreams can also be fever dreams, and visions can be hallucinations. Gingrich revealed perhaps more than he wanted when, in his remarks in Florida, he spoke of the need to think big. “You don’t inspire the American nation,” he said, “with trivial, bureaucratically rational objectives.”

But you do with vast, bureaucratically irrational ones? Grandiosity will never be grand. Grandiosity is the thing of empty promises, triumphal arches and Dear Leader shrines. Grandness is the thing of which great nations — and great Presidents — are made.

[Kluger is a senior editor at TIME and the author The Sibling Effect. The views expressed are solely his own.]

"To the Moon, Newt!"

Gingrich’s wasteful, scientifically unsound plan to put colonists on lunar soil.

by

Lawrence Krauss

January 27th, 2012

Slate

Newt Gingrich described himself as a visionary when he unveiled plans Wednesday to create a mammoth new space program, including a permanent colony on the moon within the next nine years. Within eight years, he pledges a new Mars rocket program—specifically, a “continually operating propulsion system) capable of getting to Mars within a remarkably short time.” He also reiterated his plan to declare at least part of the moon as U.S. territory, with colonists capable of petitioning for statehood status.

There is little doubt that Mr. Gingrich believes in big ideas. Unfortunately, however, there is a difference between big ideas and good ideas. After all, being a visionary doesn’t mean abandoning practicality altogether but rather harnessing it creatively to make new things happen.

Put aside that Gingrich was speaking in Florida, the state most invested in space exploration and, by happenstance, the next up on the Republican primary schedule. Let’s consider cost first. The Apollo missions to the moon cost in excess of $100 billion in current dollars. In 2005, NASA administrator Michael Griffin estimated the cost of a program to land four astronauts on the moon by 2018 (as was then planned), at $104 billion.

Now, four astronauts is not a permanent colony on the moon. To have a permanent colony, you would have to manufacture housing, most likely underground, or at least under significant shielding, since there is no atmosphere and no magnetic field to shield against the harmful effects of cosmic rays for an extended period. Not to mention the need to build facilities for waste recycling, plus food storage and preparation. That is, unless we continually provide food and other provisions for pilgrims from Earth, creating a non-self-sustaining colony. But Gingrich has already made it quite clear, in his attacks on President Obama, that he would not like to be remembered for championing any such sort of government-sponsored food program.

So, to truly embark on such an endeavor within a decade, we would have to spend somewhere between a few hundred billion and a trillion dollars. Whether we could develop the necessary technology for such a task within a decade is an open question, although for a sufficiently large investment, it might not be impossible. However, Gingrich is vying for leadership of a party whose major rallying cry is an end to big government programs and make-work projects to stimulate the economy.

Gingrich might argue that we need not rely on government for the investment. However, without a clear business plan, it is hard to imagine private money investing $1 trillion in a program with no clear commercial goal.

Yet he did not explain precisely what he wanted to do with such a colony, or what it might achieve, besides potentially populating a new 51st state. Certainly the goal would not be a scientific one, since there is little scientific gain to be made that would justify the cost, and one could populate the whole solar system with unmanned spacecraft that could explore all the planets and their moons for this cost, as well as send up satellites that could map the heavens on unprecedented scales.

So is manufacturing his goal? But what would we manufacture on the moon that we could not do on Earth for a fraction of the cost? It is true that there may be significant otherwise terrestrially rare isotopes like helium-3 in the lunar soil, and some have argued that this would be useful for fusion power here on Earth. But since we don’t yet know how to produce fusion power on Earth, it seems a little premature to rush out on a trillion-dollar adventure to gather up potential fuel.

Perhaps we could put mirrors on the moon to beam sunlight to Earth for power. But given that currently 10,000 times the total energy used by humanity on a daily basis falls on the Earth from the sun, it is not clear that we need to go to the moon to harness more of it.

Gingrich also said during this same address that he envisions a vibrant commercial near-Earth space program for the purposes of science, tourism, and manufacturing. Once again, he didn’t bother to explore precisely what sort of program one might envisage here. It took more than $100 billion to manufacture a white elephant in near-Earth orbit called the International Space Station, a large, smelly metal can that to date has produced no science, no manufacturing, and tourism that only billionaires could afford. Perhaps Gingrich imagines a vibrant Earth-surveying program that might help monitor climate change? No, probably not.

Not content to merely colonize the moon in a decade, Gingrich has also promised to develop a viable Mars program to begin human space exploration of that planet within the next decade. It is hard to imagine why he didn’t also promise an intergalactic starship in this timeframe as well, as long as he was being visionary.

Finally, Gingrich may not be aware that the current U.S. flags on the moon don’t mean we own it, any more than those on U.S. research stations in Antarctica mean we own that continent.

But I suppose if one is willing to suspend reality to imagine creating an imaginary new expensive, and expansive, space program from nothing in a mere decade, without raising the taxes to do it, anything is possible. It certainly seems easier to imagine populating the moon in this way than actually solving the very real problems we face on Earth today.