Newt Gingrich, campaigning in Florida, says if he's elected president we'll have a permanent base on the moon by 2020. This has been applauded in the Sunshine state because, of course, it would provide a good deal of employment there. From aerospace engineers to hotel janitors, the "space coast" benefits from much federal money being pumped into the exploration and occupation of space.
I think it's a little ironic that Gingrich, running as a proponent of cutting federal spending and proclaiming at every stop that government cannot create jobs, would pander in this way. While it might attract the votes of people whose political philosophy is "No federal spending unless it is on me," I doubt it will play well with people who are honestly concerned about the annual budget deficit.
I'd rather talk about the moon than about Newt Gingrich. The moon orbits the earth at a distance of about 238,000 miles. It is substantially smaller than earth, and hunan beings (and everything else) weigh only about one-sixth there of what they do here. The moon has no atmosphere. There probably is water ice in the deep crater bottoms on the moon and some water ice beneath the lunar dust, though the astronauts who went there didn't notice any. There are tiny moonquakes from time to time, but the moon is nearly dead geologically. That could change if the moon is hit by a meteor.
It is possible that there are metals or other substances on the moon that could be of value on earth, but transportation costs at this time make it unlikely that any profitable mining could be accomplished. Although there are more esoteric schemes on the drawing boards, such as collecting solar energy on the moon and reflecting it to earth, such things appear to be more science fiction than science fact, at least for now.
So why go back there? Honestly, I can't think of a good reason. It's a topic that could be left to the scientists rather than the politicians as far as I'm concerned. If we're going to spend big buckets of money on space exploration, however, I'd opt for robots first. Then it strikes me that the next great step into space should be a manned voyage to a near-earth asteroid rather than the moon. There are such asteroids that periodically approach within four to five million miles of us. That's about twenty times as far as the moon is, and would be a good dress rehearsal for the jump someday to Mars. The gravity on an asteroid would be a small fraction of what it is on the moon, meaning the spaceship would need very little thrust to escape from it for the trip home.
These asteroids probably are very similar to the moon in terms of their composiiton - metals and rocks - so we could learn about the origins of the solar system from them as well as we could by bringing home more samples of moon rocks. In addition, I think we'd learn as much or more about survivability in space from a trip to an asteroid as we would from a trip back to the moon.
So Newt, although it might be good politics to hold out the promise of expensive space exploration this week as you pursue a chance to lose to Barack Obama in the fall, why not check with the scientists and engineers at the Kennedy Space Center before making promises you're not likely to keep?
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