Fast-forward to 2012 where the new Newt Gingrich thinks NASA should spend 10% of its budget on prize money for competitions between private companies, spurring a sort of private-enterprise space race. These private space entrepreneurs are our best hope for moon colonization, Gingrich argues, not big expensive NASA projects.

"I think you've got to look at some of these science projects," he told Discovery News. "The fact that the Webb telescope has gone from $1.5 billion to $9 billion -- and I'm told that people don't believe that at $9 billion it's going to be on budget -- at some point you have to stop and say, 'There's something systemically wrong when you get into this scale of an overrun. I think that deserves serious review.'"



Private companies have made serious strides toward space exploration in recent years. The $10 million dollar Ansari X Prize was won in 2004 by SpaceShipOne, a private shuttle designed by the Tier One project, the brainchild of Burt Rutan and Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen.

Virgin Galactic, a subsidiary of billionaire Richard Branson's Virgin Group, is already signing up passengers for a future launch of SpaceShipTwo.

Meanwhile PayPal entrepreneur Elon Musk's SpaceX company is close to launching its Dragon spacecraft which it is hoping to dock onto the International Space Station, marking "the first successful docking of a private spacecraft with the International Space Station - a huge leap forward for the future of commerical spaceflight." These and other space exploration companies work closely with NASA and will continue to do so.

In a passage with echoes of today's space-age conversation, Timothy Leary wrote in his 1977 The Sociobiology of Human Metamorphosis that "despite the campaign rhetoric, the bureaucracies-big business and big government-are here to stay. The centralization effort cannot be checked, but it can be rationally directed towards our species goal: Space Migration."

The words may as well be straight out of Gingrich's mouth. Certainly his proposed prize money isn't a bad idea given the way that the private and public investment has played out in the past, though it might make more sense to simply add to the already strained space budget rather than cut 10% from it.

But will private companies, or NASA for that matter, be able to colonize the moon by 2020?

"When we are not expecting a U.S. crewed launch to the ISS until 2016-2017 and are just getting started on a lunar-class launch vehicle, establishing a lunar outpost by 2020 is a fantasy," space policy expert John Logsdon, professor emeritus at George Washington University, told SPACE.com. "It would be much better to set realistic goals, but that is not Mr. Gingrich's strong suit."

Gingrich is more interested in bold visions than realistic goals. "The reason you have to have a bold and large vision is you don't arouse the American nation with trivial, bureaucratic, rational objectives," he said at a round-table in Florida.