Presidential Hopeful Promises the Moon

What would you do if you could, quite realistically, take a trip to the moon? If the US Presidential contender, Republican Newt Gingrich gets his way, that’s exactly what we’ll be doing.
According to the GOP potential nominee, during a speech given in a city quite close to the ‘Space’ action – Cocoa – if he is elected, America will have a working moon base and new engines that would easily get us to Mars by the year 2020.
That’s only eight years away.
He claims that the space program only needs a kick in the rear to get it restarted, but is that all that America’s space program really needs? With China boosting it’s space program to the point where a Chinese station is planned for the same year, and the entirety of the American Space Transportation System officially decommissioned, it might be hard to think that such a goal would even be close to something we could accomplish.
At the same time, America once said the same thing about the giant rock that seems attached to our planet via an invisible string. Only in their day it wasn’t a man named Gingrich – but a man named Kennedy instead.
Will the bold plans of one GOP hopeful put the US back on track towards an awe inspiring, and an international path into space? Or have the American days of space glory fallen by the wayside in time for another space power to rise?
If true to his word, an America under Gingrich may begin to see much more Trek tech as the magic year approaches. With the Tricorder Xprise contest in full swing and touch screens already being developed to read DNA and other human electronic signals, how far off is the world that we all write in and create in everyday here on Starbase 118?
How long will it be before we can really touch the stars?
Photo Credits: Space.com