Politics

Gingrich blasts NASA, imagines private sector creating permanent moon station

Paul Conner Executive Editor
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Newt Gingrich took aim at NASA Monday night during the New Hampshire GOP debate, calling it “an absolute case study in why bureaucracy can’t innovate.”

“If you take all the money we’ve spent at NASA since we’ve landed at the moon and you applied that money to incentives for the private sector, we would today probably have a permanent station on the moon, three or four permanent stations in space, a new generation of lift vehicles,” Gingrich said.

“Instead what we’ve had is bureaucracy after bureaucracy after bureaucracy and failure after failure,” he continued.

The question was on whether or not the candidates thought that space exploration was a worthy investment of federal money.

“We’re at the beginning of a whole new cycle of extraordinary opportunities, and unfortunately NASA is standing in the way of it when NASA ought to be getting out of the way and encouraging the private sector,” Gingrich said.

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