Over at National Review Tuesday, I report on an unexpected question from the local press to former House Speaker and GOP presidential candidate Newt Gingrich on space policy last night. As I note over there, it caught all of the other candidates off guard, but Newt was happy to knock it out of the park, as no doubt the questioner hoped he would do.
Newt is almost certainly the most informed candidate on this issue, having been personally interested in and involved with space policy for over three decades, though most don’t realize it. He was a rare Republican voice of reason last year when he jointly published an op-ed with former U.S. Rep. (and chairman of the House Science Committee) Robert Walker (R-Pa.) supporting the Obama administration’s new space policy.
Despite last night’s question, though, it’s unlikely that the election will swing on space policy — the last time space policy was important in a presidential election was over fifty years ago, when the nation was still panicked by Sputnik, and Democrat Senator John F. Kennedy ran against Vice President (under Eisenhower) Richard Nixon on the “missile gap” with the Soviet Union.
Next year, most of the states in which space is locally important — Alabama, Texas, Utah, California — won’t be battlegrounds. The only exception is the swing state of Florida, which the administration will almost certainly have to win again if it is to retain the White House. But it only affects a few thousand jobs on the so-called “Space Coast,” in Brevard and Volusia counties, near Cape Canaveral and Kennedy Space Center. Despite the layoffs coming with the end of the Shuttle, the new policy will also create many new jobs, and ones less dependent on NASA budget levels, as new commercial markets start to be serviced by the new generation of space companies. In addition, even with the space jobs factor, Florida voters will remain much more concerned about the state of the economy, the housing crisis, and (for all the seniors there) Medicare.
So don’t expect a repeat of last night’s surprise in future debates — it was probably just a personal interest of the particular reporter who asked the question. Just in case, though, the other candidates, and particularly Rep. Michelle Bachmann, (R-Minn.), might want to get up to speed with Newt on the issue, by talking to the Tea Party in Space and my own organization, the Competitive Space Task Force.
