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BY JOHN SOLTES
NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM
Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich told an audience of Florida supporters on Wednesday that he hopes the United States will one day colonize the moon. And not just any day, but within the next decade.
“By the end of my second term, we will have the first permanent base on the moon, and it will be American,” the former House speaker said, according to a YouTube video of his speech. “We will have commercial near-Earth activities that include science, tourism and manufacturing, and are designed to create a robust industry precisely on the model of the development of the airlines in the 1930s. … It is in our interest to acquire so much experience in space that we clearly have a capacity that the Chinese and Russians will never come anywhere close to matching.”
The hundreds of audience members in attendance cheered Gingrich, who has been campaigning in Florida ever since winning the recent South Carolina primary. He’s currently in a national struggle for the Republican presidential nomination with Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum and Ron Paul. Real Clear Politics, which averages the top polls in the nation, has Romney leading Gingrich by little more than 3 percentage points in the Sunshine State.
On the lunar colonization plans, Gingrich’s opponents have pegged him as “grandiose.” Much like the rest of his campaign, the candidate took the criticism in stride.
“I accept the charge that I am grandiose,” Gingrich said, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer.“Americans are instinctively grandiose.”
At a debate in 2011, Romney told the moderator: “We could start with his idea to have a lunar colony that would mine minerals from the moon. I’m not in favor of spending that kind of money to do that.”
Few details have emerged on exactly how Gingrich would achieve his ambitious plans to populate the moon. His campaign website focuses more on the economy, national security and energy plans.
“I am sick of being told we have to be timid,” he told the crowd. “I am sick of being told we have to be limited to technologies that are 50 years old.”
