Newt Gingrich on Technology Former Republican Representative (GA-6) and Speaker of the House

Get an American on the moon before the Chinese get there

ROMNEY: That's an enormous expense. And right now I want to be spending money here.

Q: [to Gingrich]: How do you plan to create a base on the moon in eight years while keeping taxes down?

GINGRICH: You start with the question, do you really believe NASA in its current form is the most effective way of leveraging investment in space? My point is, I believe by the use of prizes, by the use of incentives, by opening up the space port so that it's available on a ready basis for commercial fight--there are many things you can do to leverage accelerating the development of space. Lindbergh flew to Paris for a $25,000.00 prize. If we had a handful of serious prizes, you'd see an extraordinary number of people out there trying to get to the moon first. And I'd like to have an American on the moon before the Chinese get there.

6 or 7 private launches every day; permanent moon base

GINGRICH: Look at what John F. Kennedy said in 1961: "We will go to the moon in this decade." No American had orbited the Earth. The technology didn't exist. And a generation of young people went into science and engineering, and they were tremendously excited. And they had a future. The program I envision would probably end up being 90% private sector, but it would be based on a desire to get NASA out of the business of trying to run rockets, and to create a system where it's easy for private sector people to be engaged. I want to see us move from one launch occasionally to 6 or 7 launches a day because so many private enterprises walk up and say, we're prepared to go do it. I do not want to be the country that having gotten to the moon first, turned around and said, it doesn't really matter. I think that is a path of national decline.

I favor Internet freedom; SOPA favors Hollywood

GINGRICH: Well, you're asking a conservative about the economic interests of Hollywood. And I'm weighing it... Virtually everybody who's technologically advanced, including Google and YouTube and Facebook, say this is going to totally mess up the Internet, and the bill in its current form is written really badly and leads to a range of censorship that is totally unacceptable. Well, I favor freedom. We have a Patent Office, we have copyright law. If a company finds that it has genuinely been infringed upon, it has the right to sue, but the idea that we're going to preemptively have the government start censoring the Internet on behalf of giant corporations' economic interests strikes me as exactly the wrong thing to do.

We can't compete with China with an inferior infrastructure

GINGRICH: Let's stick with infrastructure, because I think it's a very big, very important topic. You cannot compete with China in the long run if you have an inferior infrastructure. You've got to move to a 21st century model. That means you've got to be technologically smart and you have to make investments. So for example here [in N.H.], the Northern Pass project ought to be buried and should be along the state's right of way. Which means you'd need these modern techniques to bring electricity from Quebec all the way down to Boston in a way that also preserves the beauty of northern New Hampshire. [We need] the ability to have an infrastructure investment program that would actually get us back on track. If you don't have some systematic investment program, then you are not going to be able, I think, to compete with China and India.

America should be in space, aggressively & entrepreneurially

Q: Why don't you name them?

ROMNEY: We can start with his idea to have a lunar colony that would mine minerals from the from the moon, I'm not in favor of spending that kind of money to do that.

GINGRICH: I'm proud of trying to find things that give young people a reason to study science and math and technology and telling them that someday in their lifetime, they could dream of going to the moon, they could dream of going t Mars. I grew up in a generation where the space program was real, where it was important, and where frankly it is tragic that NASA has been so bureaucratized. Iowa's doing brilliant things, attracting brilliant students. I want to give them places to go and things to do. And I'm happy to defend the idea that America should be in space and should be there in an aggressive, entrepreneurial way.

Prepare more for electromagnetic pulse attack

CAIN: Having been a ballistics analyst and a computer scientist early in my career, cyber-attacks: that's something that we do not talk enough about, and I happen to believe that that is a national security area that we do need to be concerned about.

GINGRICH: I helped create the Hart-Rudman Commission with President Clinton, and they came back after three years and said the greatest threat to the United States was the weapon of mass destruction in an American city, probably from a terrorist. That was before 9/11. That's one of the three great threats. The second is an electromagnetic pulse attack which would literally destroy the country's capacity to function. And the third, as Herman just said, is a cyber attack. All three of those are outside the current capacity of our system to deal with.

FactCheck: 1.3 million Twitter followers is exaggerated

Gingrich embraced Twitter long before most political figures (he's sent more than 2,700 tweets). But Gawker cited an anonymous former Gingrich staffer who estimated about 80% of the followers were created by agencies wit dummy accounts.

An analysis concluded only 8% of Gingrich's Twitter followers were confirmed as "real human beings." People can pay companies to gather Twitter followers (about $12.99 per 1,000), but the Twitter followers are often fake. The Gingrich campaign strongly denies using such tactics.

There is strong evidence that not all 1.3 million followers are real. There are Twitter followers and there are bona fide Twitter followers. Gingrich has 1.3 million of the former, not so many of the latter.

Replace NASA with incentives to private sector

GINGRICH: I'm a big fan of going into space and I worked to get the shuttle program to survive at one point. But NASA has become a case study in why bureaucracy can't innovate. If you take all the money we've spent at NASA since we landed on the moon and you had applied that money for incentives to the private sector, we would today probably have a permanent station on the moon, and a new generation of lift vehicles. And instead, what we've had is bureaucracy after bureaucracy and failure after failure. We're at the beginning of a whole new cycle of extraordinary opportunities. And, unfortunately, NASA is standing in the way of it, when NASA ought to be getting out of the way and encouraging the private sector.

PAWLENTY: I don't think we should eliminate the space program.

GINGRICH: I didn't say end the space program. I said you could get into space faster & more effectively, if you decentralized it & got it out of Washington

Treat WikiLeaks as enemy combatants engaged in terrorism

A: Information warfare is warfare, and Julian Assange is engaged in warfare. Information terrorism, which leads to people getting killed is terrorism, and Julian Assange is engaged in terrorism. He should be treated as an enemy combatant. WikiLeaks should be closed down permanently and decisively. But even more, how can these documents have been released?

Q: Via a private in the Army.

A: How do you have a system so stupid [that an Army Private can] download a quarter million documents and the system doesn't say [anything]? I mean this is a system so stupid that it ought to be a scandal of the first order. This administration is so shallow, and so amateurish about national security that it is painful and dangerous.

NASA bureaucrats hijacked the great space adventure

I propose a dramatically bolder approach. NASA currently has plans to spend twenty years getting to Mars at a cost estimated of up to $450 billion. A very significant amount of that time and money will be spent studying, planning, and thinking. We would get much further much faster if we simply established two prizes: a tax-free $5 billion prize for the first permanent lunar base and a tax-free $20 billion prize for the first team to get to Mars and back.

Establish three high-speed rail corridors; NY-MA; FL; & CA

There are three problems with trying to build high-speed systems in the US and, not surprisingly, all three relate to government.

1. Union work rules make it impossible, at least if Amtrak has anything to do with it.
2. Pork barrel politicians waste money subsidizing absurdly uneconomic routes
3. Regulations and litigation involved in large-scale construction have become time- consuming and expensive.

Invest in scientific revolutions: energy, space, environment

1. A new system of civil justice to reduce the burden of lawsuits and to incentivize young people to go into professions other than the law.
2. A dramatically simplified tax code that favors savings, entrepreneurship, investment, & constant modernization of equipment & technology.
3. Math & science education [that encourages] young Americans to both discover the science of the future and to compete successfully with other well-educated societies.
4. Investing in the scientific revolutions that are going to transform our world--particularly in energy, space, & environment.
5. Transforming health care into a 21st Century Intelligent Health System that improves our health while lowering costs dramatically. In the process, American health care will become our highest value export and foreign exchange earning sector.

NASA focuses too much on safety and elite standards

Space is now caught in a destructive circle in which Congress refuses to vote the money needed for big missions because it does not trust the NASA bureaucracy and NASA can't do the jobs it is assigned because Congress refuses to fund it. NASA is also elitist. The standard for an astronaut has been set so high that most people know it is not a program for them.

Ironically the Russians, in desperate search of hard currency, have become the 1st country to open up their programs to a paying customer.

21st century reform: Being online better than being in line

Building a citizen-centered model of government starts with the general rule that being online is better than being in line. There is no reason why government cannot deliver services and information the way that Google or the Weather Channel can. Technology should make government more responsive to the citizens it serves, and more creative in meeting their needs.

The potential to use the computer, the Internet, and communications has only begun to be tapped. The more rapidly government leaders study and learn their potential, the more rapidly we will invent a 21st century information age governing system.

Focus on investing in science and discovery

1. Math & science education: We must fundamentally change the way we educate our children about science & discovery, to produce more math & science students.
2. Increased funding for the NSF (National Science Foundation): Increase annual funding from $4.7 billion to $15 billion
3. We must fund large-scale marquee projects like Internet-based astronomical data and collected.
4. High priority for CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention)
5. Mobilize a movement in favor of scientific research
6. Space: space exploration has a proven record of achieving major scientific breakthroughs.