Noonday Poll: Moon Base, Yes or No?

Campaigning in Florida, Newt Gingrich this week told the state's Space Coast residents what they wanted to hear: If elected, Gingrich would breathe new life into the space program:

"By the end of my second term, we will have the first permanent base on the moon, and it will be American," Gingrich said, according to a report on National Public Radio.

"We will have commercial near-Earth activities that include science, tourism, and manufacturing, and are designed to create a robust industry precisely on the model that was developed by the airlines in the 1930s, because it is in our interest to acquire so much experience in space that we clearly have a capacity that the Chinese and the Russians will never come anywhere close to matching," Gingrich said, according to a transcript of the speech on the National Space Society's website. "And by the end of 2020 we will have the first continuous propulsion system in space capable of getting to Mars in a remarkably short time, because 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."

Click here to hear the speech.