Gingrich promises America permanent colony on moon

REPUBLICAN presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich has vowed to establish a permanent moon colony and develop a spacecraft capable of getting to Mars by the end his second term as president.

It won him thunderous applause at a Florida rally yesterday where he was preaching to the converted, in that federal cuts to the space programme have caused widespread job losses among locals.

Gingrich, whom latest polls put neck and neck with Mitt Romney ahead of next Tuesday's Florida primary, also promised "commercial near-Earth activities that include science, tourism and manufacturing".

The Washington Post reports that Gingrich plans to find the money for his 2020 vision by ring-fencing 10 per cent of NASA's budget to give out as prizes for innovations that help push these goals into fruition.

Out-there ideas about space travel are bread and butter for the man they dubbed ‘Newt Skywalker' in his home state of Georgia.

His love of science and technology is well documented, and his 1996 memoir, [i]To Renew America[i], reveals how the young Newt found the sci-fi writer Isaac Asimov "was shaping my view of the future in... profound ways."

Ideas he has voiced in the past include solving global warming by artificially controlling the climate using Geo-engineering, as reported in The Guardian, while Reuters quotes him suggesting America's highways be lit at night by using giant space mirrors. He has also suggested several variations of an orbiting space-laser death-ray.

The New York Times notes Gingrich has a passion for doomsday theories, and a particular phobia about America suffering an EMP attack, whereby a nuclear weapon detonated in space could cause an electromagnetic pulse that might theoretically knock out electrical circuits nationwide.

He even wrote the foreword to the thriller novel One Second After, which deals with the subject. Nuclear scientists are near universal in their dismissal of the dangers of such an attack. ·