Newt in Space

Newt Gingrich is catching a lot of flak for his endorsement on Wednesday of aggressive American space exploration.

I wish he weren't.

Almost 50 years ago, a President called on the country to take up the great challenge of breaching the threshold of space and another celestial body. That a total of 12 men and no women have walked on the moon since then is both an incredible triumph and the squandering of an incredible promise. John F. Kennedy was right: it was worth doing in 1969, and it is worth doing again today. But, the question remains: will Speaker Gingrich's call to action go down in history as a the defining moment in a space age revitalization? Or does it position him a little too far along the nutty axis for this year's economy-focused voting public (the Daily Show certainly thinks so)?

Now, Newt is not putting forward any Keynesian spending policies. He has proposed setting aside 10% of NASA's $18 billion as prize money for private innovations. Space exploration is the perfect arena for the private sector's paradigm-bucking expertise. Corporations like Virgin Galactic and SpaceX are showing everyone how it's done. Virgin Galactic is offering private space flights for $200,000, while SpaceX will begin supplying the International Space Station for NASA this year, following the retirement of the Space Shuttle. But without the support of government grants, the long-term payoffs of space exploration might never materialize.

Even though Newt's plan doesn't involve huge infusions of funding or the acquisition of East German rocket science brain trusts, both of which would be hard to pull off in 2012, it is encouraging to hear that someone is talking about space exploration. The relative silence of public discourse about our immediate neighborhood should be contested, by whoever has the political chutzpah to do so. If that chutzpah has to be the same stuff that gives us awful sound bites about the laziness of the black community, well… maybe I'll just give you a 60's flashback, instead: