A proposal by former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich laughed at just four years ago is now being hailed as a great idea after Tesla CEO Elon Musk suggested it.
At the Vox Media Code Conference Wednesday, Musk called for unmanned missions to Mars by 2018 and actual manned missions by 2025. “I’m hopeful that the first people could be taken to Mars in 10 to 12 years, I think it’s certainly possible for that to occur.” Musk said in an interview with CNBC.
Slate mocked Gingrich during the 2012 election cycle in January of 2012, comparing Newt’s idea to that of Star Trek science fiction. “Not content to merely colonize the moon in a decade, Gingrich has also promised to develop a viable Mars program to begin human space exploration of that planet within the next decade. It is hard to imagine why he didn’t also promise an intergalactic starship in this timeframe as well, as long as he was being visionary.”
“There is every reason to believe that you have a lot of folks in this country, and around the world, who would put up an amazing amount of money and would make the space coast literally hum with activity because they would be drawn to achieve these prizes: going back to the moon permanently; getting to Mars as rapidly as possible” Newt said during an NBC Republican presidential debate in January, 2012.
Gingrich thinks NASA is “standing in the way” of what was once a spectacular space program with boundless vision. He displayed a keen interest in space exploration over his career in politics, and claims bureaucracy is a slow moving tortoise that’s slowing innovation down.
“Well, sadly — and I say this sadly, because I’m a big fan of going into space and I actually worked to get the shuttle program to survive at one point — NASA has become an absolute case study in why bureaucracy can’t innovate,” he said.
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