Ahhhh, the smooth, velvet pitch of a corporate raider, microphone in hand, wooing the stockholders. A scene right out of ‘Wall Street,’ space advocates. Gordon Gekko would be so proud. “Presidents” don’t tell you how to get there, they point and say, ‘go there’ and direct the people who know how to make it happen to ‘make it happen.’
How many times does Romney have to telegraph in debates, statements and speeches that the only space he cares about is the square footage of his fifteen homes. If you’re a space advocate- NASA or NewSpace or a blend of the two- Romney is not your guy. And anyone in the space community along the Florida Space Coast who throws their political support to him deserved- or deserves- to hear his most decisive, definitive directive on ‘space’ as articulated in the recent debate: “You’re fired.” Romney is cut from the same cloth as Ivan Boesky, who famously quipped to his wife, “What good is the moon? You can’t buy or sell it.”
Content aside, the problem w/Newt is the messenger, not the message. A message, BTW, steeped in the high risk low-to-no ROI of NewSpace ventures, screwy prize schemes and back door efforts to tap public monies as a subsidy for ventures the private capital markets have not embraced, in an attempt to socialize the risk on the many to benefit a select few. We just went through that with banks.
Space is worthy of debate at the national level, but in this case, roundly lampooned across the cable shows by the youngish journalists, pundits and talking heads in Medialand who chortled on camera at talk of ‘moon colonies’ and ‘lunar bases,’ turning space advocacy into a punch line. You know, the mid-40 year olds; the ‘Joe Scarrborough’ generation. Scarrborough, an ex-GOP Florida congressman, openly chortled at Newt’s proposal qith his colleagues for hours on his MSNBC program, ‘Morning Joe.’ That kind of clownish ignorance is bad to see, whether you’re an advocate for NewSpace or traditional NASA activities. Walter Cronkite is rolling over in his grave.
