Cocoa, Fla. — The moon, a thin crescent, hovered in the western sky like a crystal bowl ready to catch a falling star. Cheers filled the air as Newt Gingrich’s campaign bus eased out of the parking lot of the Holiday Inn Express. He had just made an astonishing vow: By the end of his second term as president, the U.S. flag would once again be planted on the moon.  America, he said, would have a permanent lunar base.

Gingrich’s speech Wednesday created big headlines Thursday on the Space Coast. People here have been eager to hear some launchin’ words.

The question is whether this is science fiction.

“I think it’s an aggressive mission,” said Robert Whelan, an aerospace executive with Harris Corp. That was his polite way of saying that building a lunar base by January 2021 — or even putting a single human bootprint on lunar soil — would be difficult to achieve.

Gingrich proposed doing this without increasing NASA’s budget. Instead, he’d transform the agency’s culture, rely heavily on private industry and leverage American ingenuity. He said he’d use 10 percent of the NASA budget — which would amount to nearly $2 billion a year — to create prizes, incentives for entrepreneurs to achieve spaceflight milestones.

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[Image: NASA]

*The Mars Society is a registered non-profit organization that does not endorse or support any particular candidate during the political campaign season.  By posting this article, our sole intention is to better inform our members and the general public about any newsworthy information that could possibly impact a humans-to-Mars mission in the future.