"Most people don't take it literally when they're told to shoot for the moon — but thinking small isn't Naveen Jain's way. The 52-year-old Internet entrepreneur is a co-founder of Moon Express Inc., one of several companies in the Google Lunar X Prize competition, in which privately funded teams will try to put robots on the moon by 2016.
Jain's plans don't end at reaching the moon's surface. MoonEx, as his company is also known, plans to make billions mining the moon for precious resources. It also hopes to let customers send messages and materials to the moon."
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On a related note, Romney was attacking Gingrich for promoting lunar colonies at the debate in Iowa. Here is Gingrich's idea:
"In response to another question, Gingrich criticized the handling of the nation's space program, saying the country was leading the world, but the program is now stymied by bureaucracy.
“Instead of being the exciting, dynamic entrepreneurial future, we studied it to death and we red-taped it to death and we created standards that are absurd,” Gingrich said.
He said he would like to devote a portion of NASA's budget and use it as tax-free prize money for private companies that develop new ways to explore space.
“If you took 5 percent of the NASA budget over the last 10 years, you'd have $8 billion in prizes,” Gingrich said. “If you said, for example, we'll pay a billion dollars to the first folks to get to the moon and be able to stay there, we'd have all sorts of folks forming various efforts to get to the moon, none of them would be applying for federal money, none of them would be sitting around waiting for grant reviews.”
--http://www2.tbo.com/news/politics/2011/nov/17/1/gingrich-tells-florida-crowd-he-welcomes-scrutiny-ar-325422/
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Newt Skywalker and the Moon Mirror =======================
"Gingrich, who has dabbled in science fiction and cited both futurist Alvin Toffler and the concept of "psychohistory" in Isaac Asimov's Foundation novels as intellectual inspirations, has long been dubbed "Newt Skywalker" thanks to his vision of future warfare that blends fact and fantasy. This streak of futurism is, by his own admission, rooted in a political and philosophical belief about technology and power. ''I would rather rely on engineers than diplomats for security,'' Gingrich told Aviation Week & Space Technology magazine in 1994, in reference to his support for missile defense."
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