What the Republican Candidates Say About Moon Colonization

A day before the most recent Republican debate in Florida, Newt Gingrich promised that if he were elected president, there would be a permanent base on the moon. The former Speaker of the House added that if 13,000 Americans were living there, the moon could apply for U.S. statehood.

At the Florida GOP debate, Gingrich was asked to outline his proposal, while the rest of the Republican field reacted to this grandiose plan. Here is what the candidates said, according to the presidential debate transcript provided by CNN:

* Newt Gingrich: “If we had a handful of serious prizes, you’d see an extraordinary number of people out there trying to get to the moon first. … It is really important to go back and look at what John F. Kennedy said in May of 1961 when he said, “We will go to the moon in this decade.” … But I’ll tell you, I do not want to be the country that having gotten to the moon first, turned around and said, it doesn’t really matter, let the Chinese dominate space, what do we care? I think that is a path of national decline, and I am for America being a great country, not a country in decline.”

* Mitt Romney: “That’s an enormous expense. And right now I want to be spending money here. Of course the space coast has been badly hurt and I believe in a very vibrant and strong space program. To define the mission for our space program, I’d like to bring in the top professors that relate to space areas and physics, the top people from industry. Because I want to make sure what we’re doing in space translates into commercial products. I want to bring in our top military experts on space needs. … I’m not looking for a colony on the moon. I think the cost of that would be in the hundreds of billions, if not trillions. I’d rather be rebuilding housing here in the U.S. I spent 25 years in business. If I had a business executive come to me and say they wanted to spend a few hundred billion dollars to put a colony on the moon, I’d say, ‘You’re fired.'”

* Rick Santorum: “I agree that we need to bring good minds in the private sector much more involved in NASA than the government bureaucracy that we have. But let’s just be honest, we run a $1.2 trillion deficit right now. We’re borrowing 40-cents of every dollar. And to go out there and promise new programs and big ideas, that’s a great thing to maybe get votes, but it’s not a responsible thing when you have to go out and say that we have to start cutting programs, not talking about how to how to grow them. We’re going to cut programs.”

* Ron Paul: “Well, I don’t think we should go to the moon. I think we maybe should send some politicians up there. … The only part that I would vote for is for national defense purposes. Not to explore the moon and go to Mars. I think that’s fantastic. I love those ideas, but I also don’t like the idea of building government business partnerships. If we had a healthy economy and had more Bill Gateses and more Warren Buffetts, the money would be there. It should be privatized, and the people who work in the industry, if you had that, there would be jobs in aerospace.”