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.

"Newtonian Physics"...Newt Gingrich style reviewed

"Is Newt Gingrich's EMP Doomsday a Reality?"

by

Ian O'Neill

December 12th, 2011

DiscoveryNews

This may sound familiar if, like me, you're a fan of "Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3" -- a hugely popular first-person video game based in a fictional near-future when the U.S. goes to war with Russia. But if you've been following the GOP presidential campaign recently, you might think one or two of the candidates are out of touch with the not-so-fictional near future.

In particular, it seems Newt Gingrich has been playing too much "Call of Duty."

Gingrich has been a long-time worrier about the threat of an attack on the U.S. from a rich terrorist organization or rogue nation -- such as North Korea or Iran -- that could cripple the nation, killing "millions" of citizens. But how could such a dastardly deed be accomplished?

Citing the specter that has been hanging over us since the Cold War, he believes the U.S. is vulnerable to an electromagnetic pulse -- or EMP for short.

A nuclear weapon could be detonated above North America, reasons Gingrich, and the resulting electronic interference would render the nation's power grid, satellites, computers etc., useless. Death and mayhem would ensue. It would be a bit like "Mad Max," but with less '70's hairdos.

"Without adequate preparation, we would basically lose our civilization in a matter of seconds," he said during a 2009 conference.

The situation is apparently so dire that Gingrich co-wrote a doomsday book on the topic, called "One Second After."

Although game developers take the effect of EMP damage for granted, what are the realities of a space-based nuclear detonation?

NEWS: What It Takes to Make a Nuclear Bomb

Supporting Gingrich's argument, the impact of high-altitude nuclear tests during the Cold War proves that detonating nuclear bombs is a bad idea all-round.

In 1962, the U.S. detonated a 1.4 megaton nuke 200 miles above the Pacific Ocean to, you know, see what would happen.

Although situated 900 miles from the blast site, Hawaii felt the impact from the famous "Starfish Prime" explosion. Streetlights were knocked out, telephone communications were blocked and household alarms were triggered.

Beautiful equatorial auroral displays also lit up the sky. The event was nicknamed the "rainbow bomb."

The nuclear blast had caused all kinds of upper-atmosphere turmoil that generated rapid and powerful changes in the Earth's magnetic field, producing a pulse throughout the atmosphere below. The resulting induction of electrical currents shorted unshielded electrical supplies, like Honolulu's streetlights.

Radiation also surged above the atmosphere, causing indiscriminate damage to a number of satellites. The world's first commercial communications satellite Telstar was also badly bruised by the incident.

ANALYSIS: Will You Survive A Nuclear Attack?

In the same year, a similar test by the Soviets -- using a smaller warhead over a populated region of Kazakhstan -- generated an amplified EMP effect due to the stronger geomagnetic field at that latitude, causing a power station to fail and catch fire.

Some of the effects of an EMP are analogous to a geomagnetic storm, when the solar wind and coronal mass ejections (CMEs) interact with the Earth's magnetosphere. Although not as localized as a nuclear explosion, there are worries that an intense solar storm could generate huge currents across the Earth's atmosphere, shorting entire power grids.

In 1989, for example, the Hydro-Quebec power company in Canada was caught unawares by a huge solar eruption that generated intense atmospheric disruption, overloading the power supply, impacting thousands of customers. Solar flares and CME's regularly cause global communication outages and sometimes even turn satellites into "zombiesats."

OK, so the physics is there, Gingrich's concerns appear to be well-placed. Or are they?

Although Cold War tests have proven that there is some impact by a high-altitude nuclear blast to assets on the ground via an EMP, the result is far from certain.

Commenting in The Space Review last year, Yousaf M. Butt, a nuclear physicist and consultant with the Federation of American Scientists, said, "If terrorists want to do something serious, they'll use a weapon of mass destruction -- not mass disruption. They don't want to depend on complicated secondary effects in which the physics is not very clear."

Like an intense solar storm, although the worst-case scenario could inflict damage on satellites and national power grids, there's no certain way of knowing the impact of any given solar event. The same goes for a hypothetical EMP attack. The target is indiscriminate and the outcome is far from certain.

Surely, if a rogue state or terrorist organization had a nuclear warhead, they'd much rather find new and ingenious ways of rolling it into Washington, D.C. undetected rather than strapping it atop a rocket and blasting it into space?

Besides, the Pentagon's Missile Defense Agency has got that scenario covered if anyone was stupid enough to send any projectile toward the U.S.

According to Pentagon spokesman Richard Lehner, downing an incoming missile would be pretty straightforward. There's an arsenal of interceptor missiles just waiting for the opportunity to take out an EMP threat before it explodes.

"It doesn't matter if the target is Chicago or 100 miles over Nebraska," he said. "For the interceptor, it's the same thing."

Alas, Gingrich's EMP concern is, at best, misplaced.

In my opinion, the threat of a solar flare-induced disaster is far more serious than a megalomaniac or rogue state flying a nuclear warhead into space. And what about asteroids? There's lots of those floating around just waiting for the opportunity to drop into some unsuspecting gravitational well. There are plenty of real space-based threats out there that could be added to political wrangling without having to make one up.

Unfortunately, real space threats aren't politically "real" until a meteorite flattens a city.


Newt Gingrich has been smoking something odd...shockwave of electricity?

Newt Gingrich has been smoking something odd...shockwave of electricity?

"Among Gingrich’s Passions, a Doomsday Vision"

by

William J. Broad

December 11th, 2011

The New York Times

Newt Gingrich, the Republican presidential hopeful, wants you to know that as commander in chief he is ready to confront one of the most nightmarish of doomsday scenarios: a nuclear blast high above the United States that would instantly throw the nation into a dark age.

In debates and speeches, interviews and a popular book, he is ringing alarm bells over what experts call the electromagnetic pulse, or EMP — a poorly understood phenomenon of the nuclear age.

The idea is that if a nuclear weapon, lofted by a missile, were detonated in outer space high above the American heartland, it would set off a huge and crippling shockwave of electricity. Mr. Gingrich warns that it would fry electrical circuits from coast to coast, knocking out computers, electrical power and cellphones. Everything from cars to hospitals would be knocked out.

“Millions would die in the first week alone,” he wrote in the foreword to a science-fiction thriller published in 2009 that describes an imaginary EMP attack on the United States. A number of scientists say they consider Mr. Gingrich’s alarms far-fetched.

As Mr. Gingrich starts to surge in Republican primary states, voters are likely to get to know some of his many passions. He is an outspoken advocate for zoos. He has suggested overhauling child labor laws so that students can take jobs and learn good work habits. He also has a long interest in the space program, which Mitt Romney all but mocked at the Republican debate in Iowa on Saturday night.

Challenged to say where he and Mr. Gingrich differed, Mr. Romney replied, “We could start with his idea to have a lunar colony that would mine minerals from the moon.”

But it is to the risk of an EMP attack that Mr. Gingrich has repeatedly returned. And while the message may play well to hawkish audiences, who might warm to the candidate’s suggestion that the United States engage in pre-emptive military strikes against Iran and North Korea, many nuclear experts dismiss the threat. America’s current missile defense system would thwart such an attack, these experts say, and the nations in question are at the kindergarten stage of developing nuclear arms.

The Missile Defense Agency, an arm of the Pentagon that maintains an arsenal of ground-based interceptors ready to fly into space and smash enemy warheads, says that defeating such an attack would be as straightforward as any other defense of the continental United States.

“It doesn’t matter if the target is Chicago or 100 miles over Nebraska,” said Richard Lehner, an agency spokesman. “For the interceptor, it’s the same thing.” He called the potential damage from a nuclear electromagnetic pulse attack “pretty theoretical.”

Yousaf M. Butt, a nuclear physicist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, who last year did a lengthy analysis of EMP for The Space Review, a weekly online journal, said, “If terrorists want to do something serious, they’ll use a weapon of mass destruction — not mass disruption.” He said, “They don’t want to depend on complicated secondary effects in which the physics is not very clear.”

Mr. Gingrich’s spokesman, R. C. Hammond, did not respond to e-mails asking for comment. But the candidate, a former history professor and House speaker, has defended his characterizations as accurate. At a forum in Des Moines on Saturday for military veterans, Mr. Gingrich said an electromagnetic pulse attack was one of several pressing national security threats the United States faced. “In theory, a relatively small device over Omaha would knock out about half the electricity generated in the United States,” he told the veterans.

He also referred to the apocalyptic novel “One Second After,” written by a friend and co-author of his historical novels, William R. Forstchen. The book describes an electromagnetic pulse attack on America, conjuring a world in which cars, airplanes, cellphones and refrigerators all die, and gangs of barbarians spring to life.

In the book’s foreword, Mr. Gingrich calls the grim scenario a potential “future history” that should be “terrifying for all of us.” He says he knows its frightening plausibility from decades of personal study.

Electromagnetic pulse is a real phenomenon, though many scientists consider it yesteryear’s concern. It came to light in July 1962 when the American military detonated a hydrogen bomb high above the Pacific. In Hawaii, street lights suddenly went out.

The riddle got little direct investigation because in 1963 the superpowers agreed to end all but underground detonations of nuclear arms. But theoretical studies continued, and worries rose over the decades as electronic circuits became ever more sophisticated and fragile.

Mr. Gingrich is part of a conservative movement that calls EMP an underappreciated danger. In Congress, spurred by Representative Roscoe G. Bartlett, Republican of Maryland, members of the movement hold hearings and recommend new safeguards, especially for the nation’s power grid, for which protective steps could run into many billions of dollars.

In 2004, Mr. Gingrich appeared at a House hearing and said that not taking the EMP threat more seriously “is like going aboard the Titanic knowing it’s going to sink and not putting on the lifeboats.”

As the alarms grew, critics voiced skepticism. In 2004, Philip E. Coyle III, a former head of Pentagon arms testing, wrote that the EMP lobby seemed to “extrapolate calculations of extreme weapons effects as if they were a proven fact” and “puff up rogue nations and terrorists with the capabilities of giants.”

Of late, Mr. Gingrich has emerged as the most visible worrier, often raising the electromagnetic pulse issue in speeches and public appearances. In May 2009, he addressed the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s annual policy conference.

“We are on the verge of catastrophic problems,” he said of electromagnetic attack. “We have zero national strategy to respond to it today.” That is why, Mr. Gingrich added, “I favor taking out Iranian and North Korean missiles on their sites.”

Critics of such pre-emptive attacks say their advocates ignore, among other things, that Iran is having trouble keeping its missile bases from blowing up and that North Korea cannot seem to get a big rocket off the ground without it tumbling out of control.

To even begin to attempt to do what Mr. Gingrich fears, these rogue states would have to perfect big rockets, powerful bombs and surreptitious ways to loft them high above America, military experts say. And if they did — and there are much easier ways to deliver a nuclear bomb than by missile, these experts argue — United States defenses would spring into action.

Yet Mr. Gingrich’s warnings remain persistently urgent. “Without adequate preparation, we would basically lose our civilization in a matter of seconds,” he said in a 2009 video address for a conference held by EMPact America, a private group near Buffalo that seeks to promote political action on the issue.

Lately Mr. Gingrich’s presidential campaign has widened his audience and the visibility of his message. Late last month at an appearance in Bluffton, S.C., he was asked about EMP and called it “one of the most dangerous technological developments,” likening its destructive force to “a giant lightning strike.”

Some people praise Mr. Gingrich as an atomic visionary.

Last week, on the anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Warren Kozak, an author and journalist, wrote on the op-ed page of The Wall Street Journal that the electromagnetic pulse skeptics might be right. “But 70 years ago,” he added, “similar doubters believed Japan would never be so foolish as to take on the United States of America — until, of course, it did.”