Newt Gingrich has absorbed a fair degree of ridicule for his campaign proposal to build an American colony on the moon . Before focusing the laughter solely on Gingrich , however , let 's recall that it is the declared policy of the U.S. government to return a human being to the moon by 2020 , in preparation for sending a human astronaut to Mars . If Gingrich is wrong ( and he is ) , he 's not wrong alone . As you read this , an international space station is orbiting Earth , staffed by a crew of six ( currently , three Russians , two Americans and one astronaut from the European Union ) . Cost to date : $ 100 billion . American 's space agency , NASA , is developing a next-generation rocket capable of lofting human crews . The rocket remains on the ground , but its development costs have soared , from a projected $ 28 billion to $ 44 billion . And the purpose of all this commotion and expense ? It 's very hard to answer . The useful space science these days is done by unmanned probes and satellites : the Cassini-Huygens mission that returned amazing images of Saturn and its moons ; the Calipso mission to monitor the health of Earth 's atmosphere ; the Juno mission now en route to Jupiter . In November 2011 , NASA launched its latest Mars probe , Curiosity . Curiosity should reach Mars by August . Here 's the great thing about all these missions : They do not need to be engineered to zero defect , and no plans need be made to return them home . Unmanned space exploration need not worry about food and water or the effects of isolation and low-gravity on the human spirit and body . But once human beings are inserted , everything changes . Lives are put at risk . Costs soar . And for what ? Most of the research purpose of sending human beings into space is to test the effects of sending human beings into space . The missions exist to test whether the missions can continue . This seems the very definition of futility . Human space flight originated as a symbolic competition during the Cold War era . The development of nuclear weapons deterred the U.S. and the Soviet Union from the hot war they might otherwise have fought . Instead , the two sides sought other ways to demonstrate their power , culminating in the race to the moon . If anyone had ever imagined that Soviet communism was technologically or economically competitive with American democracy , that illusion was retired forever when Neil Armstrong and his team touched the moon 's surface and then returned safely . These human missions to space were political and military , not scientific . Their point made , their purpose ended . Meanwhile , the microelectronic and robotics revolutions of the 1970s and after enabled better science to be done without any human presence at all . Unfortunately , government agencies rarely end when their purposes do . NASA had originated to send men into space , and NASA ( and its congressional supporters ) were unwilling to abandon that mission merely because it no longer had any justification . New justifications had to be found ! The space shuttle was built to serve a space station that was built to give the space shuttle something to do . And if you asked , `` Why ? '' you got an answer like this , from space enthusiast columnist Charles Krauthammer : . `` Why do it ? It 's not for practicality . We did n't go to the moon to spin off cooling suits and freeze-dried fruit . Any technological return is a bonus , not a reason . We go for the wonder and glory of it . Or , to put it less grandly , for its immense possibilities . We choose to do such things , said JFK , 'not because they are easy , but because they are hard . ' And when you do such magnificently hard things -- send sailing a Ferdinand Magellan or a Neil Armstrong -- you open new human possibility in ways utterly unpredictable . '' With the greatest respect , `` the wonder and glory of it '' is not a very compelling answer to the question : `` What do I get for my hundred billion bucks ? '' Especially since the `` wonder '' part can be better satisfied at vastly lower cost without human astronauts . The pictures from Saturn are pretty wonderful , and so will be the pictures from Jupiter , and no astronaut was needed to capture them . The hard truth to deliver to the laid-off engineers on Florida 's space coast is that space exploration is another industry where automation has reduced the number of human employees needed . To propose putting 13,000 human beings on the moon is a lot like proposing to return to the days when steel mills employed tens of thousands of people . It 's not a vision of the future . It 's nostalgia . Join the conversation on Facebook .
David Frum : Newt Gingrich has attracted some ridicule for his proposal for a moon colony . He says he is n't alone in wanting to spend money on unnecessary manned missions . Frum says science can be done more effectively , cheaply in space with unmanned missions . He says Gingrich 's proposal is n't a plan for the future , but rather nostalgia .