Newt's Moon Mission

So, for those of you with the stomach to handle the Republican Debate on CNN you saw some weird stuff. T-Paw prefers Coke to Pepsi, Herman Cain is a Deep Dish guy, as opposed to Thin Crust. I can only assume that thin crust is for pussies. And there was a lot of fluffing up the base, trashing the opposition, and just in general lying. But it's a Presidential Primary Debate and, well, what you gonna do?

BUT, the award for Dumbest Thing Said has to go to Newt. He said, and I quote,

you take all the money we've spent at NASA since we landed on the moon and you had applied that money for incentives to the private sector, we would today probably have a permanent station on the moon, three or four permanent stations in space, a new generation of lift vehicles. And instead, what we've had is bureaucracy after bureaucracy after bureaucracy and failure after failure."

So, Newt is a fan of the Space Program. Good for him, but what I think he's really a fan of are Star Trek reruns, otherwise he'd know he was talking complete shit. Or maybe he does, this is Newt after all.

But three or four permanent space stations? A permanent Moon Base? Built by the Private Sector? For What Exactly?

This is one of my major problems with this current dumb and dumbed down version of conservative thought, this simplistic idea that the Free Market is the solution for all problems.

Why the Hell would a company waste money putting people on the moon? The object of the Free Market is to create goods and services, and distribute those goods and services. So what are they doing on the moon? Opening Starbucks? Opening a Gap? For Christ's sake, find me a legitimate marketing plan for putting a base on the Moon. Seriously.

Space Exploration is Exactly the kind of thing the government should be financing. The government can afford to finance activities with no other point than the expansion of human knowledge. That's not what the Private Sector does. How much money can you make by putting three guys in million dollar suits on a rock hundreds of thousands of miles away? Short answer is: None. The slightly longer answer is: fucking less than none and you'll be a trillion dollars in debt to boot.

Now, you can argue against the necessity of the space program. In fact, a great song by the Drive-By Truckers titled, "Putting People on the Moon" does exactly that. The song is sung from the perspective of a man with absolutely nothing marveling that there is enough money to send people to the moon, but not enough to help him with his life. Not exactly a Conservative message, but a legitimate argument against NASA.

You can argue, from a conservative perspective, that the Government should not be involved in funding pure scientific research and that space Exploration is not a legitimate use of taxpayer dollars.

You can argue, also, that we are finally at the point where it makes sense to turn our space exploration over to private enterprise hoping to make a go of the moon tourism 'industry', leaving government exploration, I suppose, to the Chinese and Russians.

But, what you can't argue, and be a serious person, is that the Free Market left to it's own devices, starting in 1960 or so, would've developed an entire space society by now. But there it was, said out loud, by a person considered (at least as of a week or so ago) to be a serious contender for President. Yippee.