Cocoa, Fla.

Newt Gingrich is promising voters the moon—or a moon base, at least.

During what his campaign dubbed its “Space Coast Town Hall Meeting,” Gingrich told a packed Holiday Inn Express conference room on Wednesday evening that one of his goals at the end of two terms in the White House is to have the “first permanent base on the moon.” He also invoked John F. Kennedy just miles from the former president’s eponymous space center about the challenges and the potential of a reinvigorated space program.