From The Evening Standard:
White House hopeful Newt Gingrich today promised to fake footage of a permanent US base on the moon by 2020 if he beats Barack Obama to become president. The former House Speaker, front-runner to win the Republican ticket after his surprise win in South Carolina, also wants America to fake footage of a voyage to Mars.
On the campaign trail in Florida, where the next primary will be held on Tuesday, he said: "We want Americans to think boldly about conspiracy theories of the future. By the end of my second term, we will have the first almost-credible CGI of a permanent base on the moon and it will be American. We will have commercial near-earth activities that include cover-ups, hush money, unexplained suicides and dream manufacturing, because it is in our interest to acquire experience in trying to create the illusion of space travel. Hollywood clearly has a capacity that the Chinese and the Russians will never come anywhere close to matching."
One small step for a cameraman, one giant leap for Obama's chances of re-election.
Nasa's film department recently suffered a brutal round of spending cuts and the plan will be strongly supported by the special FX community, which fought in vain to stop Mr Obama wielding the axe. Mr Gingrich, 68, said the advertising slots during any TV broadcasts would mean the project pays for itself - he would offer part of Nasa's PR budget as a prize to tempt commercial innovation and investment.
"I'm prepared to gamble the last prestige of the presidency in communicating and building a nationwide movement in favour of nigh-on convincing grainy film of space," he said. "If we do it right, it'll be wild and it will be just the most fun you've ever seen."
The announcement took many by surprise as space has not been on the agenda in an increasingly nasty Republican election. Mr Gingrich's 12-point victory at the weekend stunned Mitt Romney and his team and left them playing catch-up. Mr Romney moved quickly to promote building movie sets based on space exploration. He said: "What we have right now is a president who does not have a vision or a mission for Nasa's publicity department. I believe our space 'programme' is important not only for the film industry, but also for commercial gamers and for glamourising the military."
Yeah, Well…
1 hour ago
10 comments:
I don't understand the burning love for space exploration that seemingly unites people of all political viewpoints. Sure it would be nice but don't we have more pressing issues, like what Bill Hicks called "the food/air thing"?
Also there are people who want orbital farms to help feed people on Earth. When surely feeding people is a "software" problem (ie. institutions) rather than a "hardware" problem (insufficient technology). Without institutional reform any benefit from space farming would be captured by the people who already capture the benefits of the Green Revolution.
Crisp rep: Walkers Crinkles - not bad at all.
At least if the Yanks had their eyes focused on the Moon, they might stop meddling in other countries affairs!
RA, I don't understand it either. Sending these cute little robots to Mars is good fun and reasonably cheap, anything more than that is a waste of money.
Re your 'software problem', completely agreed, it reminds me of these Faux Libertarians who are into sea-steading.
D, I will check them out.
BB, true. But you can't fake an invasion of Iran, can you?
If your ambition is limited to air and a lim ited amount of food, space indfustrialisation would be pointless.
If infinite amounts of electric power with minimal to zero running costs were desirable you would want solar power satellites. If comminication were of interest you would like communications satellites - the amount of information &/or size of the receiver at our end varies inversely with the size of the satellite. If you fancied unlimited supplies of all those "peak" metals we are about to run out of you would want asteroid mining. If you thought more new materials than have ever been constructed before, put together under zero G might produce some with useful properties you would want space industrialisation. If you wanted the human race to ever aspire to its potential you would certainly want this.
Of course that excludes virtually everybody in british politics - hence our problems.
The only thing worng with this is that Newt is only promising to put 10% of NASA's budget into X-Prizes.
Gingrich should just propose putting a negative land value tax (or a land value subsidy) on the moon for awhile. For every square mile of actual, productive land development on the moon, a person or company gets a billion dollars per year (to start with), tax free.
It would probably be cheaper than having the federal government in charge of another race to the moon. "Wow, Google, you put a server farm on the moon? Here is your billion dollars." Then you can gradually reduce the subsidy, until you finally come to the point where lunar land area is worth a positive amount.
Ingenious, Snarfangel! This definitely belongs in the LVT-is-the-answer-to-everything category. I salute you!
Snarf, Derek, the negative LVT is just a variant of X-prizes, as expounded by Neil Craig.
Snarfangel:
Google having a server farm on the moon would mean that it takes 3 seconds for a page to load instead of 0.1 seconds.
It is an interesting variant however Snarfangel however.
At present the various space treaties say that everything beyond the atmosphere is the "common heritage of humanity" which is interpreted to mean that it must be common property. Everyone who understands "the tragedy of the commons" will see that this has been a major barrier to commercial investment up there. Simply asserting that people have ownership (or 1,000 year occupation rights) over the bits of Moon or asteroids they occupy would encourage development. Awards for acres developed would redouble the effect.
Michael Faraday, when asked by the PM what use electricity was, replied that someday his successors would tax it. In the same way the space equivalent of LVT is that some day somebody will be taxing orbital slots in the same way we now do for bandwidth.
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