Moneybox

Lunar Exploration on the Ballot in 2012

Newt Gingrich is full of wacky ideas, so Twitter is currently ablaze with snark over comments he made this afternoon suggesting that a Gingrich administration would commit to the construction of a permanent base on the moon. How quickly we forget that lunar colonization was a real Bush administration policy proposal that had money appropriated for it and everything. Among other things, Tom DeLay’s district benefitted from space-related expenditures, and diverting funds to a Moon base somehow cut NASA’s climate-monitoring programs. The Obama administration cancelled the program with its Fiscal Year 2011 budget request, not so long ago. In the scheme of things, for the pendulum to swing back if the GOP recaptures the White House wouldn’t be all that surprising.