Romney says Gingrich's moon colony idea is over the top

Jan 27, 2012, 3:23 GMT

Washington - After days of bitter campaign rhetoric before next week's Florida primary, the debate among Republican White House hopefuls Thursday boiled down to this: Is it an absurd idea to put a US colony on the moon?

Newt Gingrich, the former speaker of the House of Representatives, has promised Florida's economically struggling space community that he would build a permanent US base on the moon by the end of his second term as president. And once 13,000 Americans are living there, they could petition to become a state.

But Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor who lags behind Gingrich by about 1 per cent in the polls, quashed the idea.

'I think the cost of that would be in the hundreds of billions, if not trillions,' he told the debate crowd at the University of North Florida in Jacksonville, Florida. 'I'd rather be rebuilding housing here in the US.'

Republican voters in Florida will vote on Tuesday to make their choice for the Republican they want to face US President Barack Obama on November 6. The race has narrowed to Gingrich and Romney, who have each won a state. Forida is key not only for the winner-take-all delegate prize, but also in the general elections in November.

Romney noted that Gingrich has made unrealistic promises to gain votes along the way - in South Carolina, which Gingrich won in an upset vote last week, it was a new interstate highway and dredging the port of Charleston, Romney noted. In New Hampshire, whose primary was won by Romney, it was a power line project and a new hospital.

'This idea of going state to state and promising what people want to hear, promising billions, hundreds of billions of dollars to make people happy, that's what got us into the trouble we're in now,' Romney said.

Gingrich retorted that he envisioned a system of 'prizes' that would spur on private industry to carry 90 per cent of the costs of building his colony on the moon, with six to seven launches a day to the moon.

'I do not want to be the country that, having gotten to the moon first, turned around and said, 'It doesn't really matter; let the Chinese dominate space; what do we care?' '

'I think that is a path of national decline. And I am for America being a great country, not a country in decline.'