Gingrich Envisions Space Colonies in Near Future - East Idaho News
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Gingrich Envisions Space Colonies in Near Future

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GETTY P 111811 NewtGingrichJPG?  SQUARESPACE CACHEVERSION=1327551976796NICHOLAS KAMM/AFP/Getty Images(COCOA BEACH, Fla.) — Newt Gingrich really wants to go to the moon — and to Mars.  And he would give statehood to a space colony, if it had a big enough population.

Speaking to a yet another massive crowd in Cocoa Beach, on Florida’s space coast, Gingrich ditched his stump speech and offered his vision of an ambitious new space program.

“By the end of my second term,” Gingrich said, prompting the crowd to erupt in applause, “we will have the first permanent base on the moon and it will be American.”

And he was just getting started; by 2020, he said, there would be regular flights to Mars.

“I am sick of being told we have to be timid and I’m sick of being told we have to be limited to technologies that are 50 years old,” Gingrich said.

Reminding the crowd that Romney had made fun of his plans for lunar colonies, Gingrich said there is something Romney’s researchers haven’t found yet, something he referred to as “the weirdest thing I’ve ever done”:  When he was in the House, he authored a bill that would allow a lunar colony to apply for statehood once it reached 13,000 residents.

A gentleman in the audience told ABC News he had worked on Gingrich’s congressional staff and helped with the bill, which was called a Northwest Territory Ordinance for Space.  The man said the bill would have allowed space colonies with over 20,000 people to apply for recognition as a U.S. territory.

In fact, after his speech a reporter asked when the lunar primary would be, and Gingrich quipped that it would be one of the later primaries.

As Gingrich presented his bold vision for space, he said his plans are another in a long line of great American ideas. In so doing, perhaps he was embracing the epithet that has so often been hurled at him, that he is “grandiose.”

“I accept the charge that I am American and Americans are instinctively grandiose because we believe in a bigger future,” he said.

Crowds in Cocoa Beach seemed to agree.

Copyright 2012 ABC News Radio

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