Asteroid mining is awesome, but Newt Gingrich’s moon base is loony. Huh?

Poor Newt Gingrich! The very same week the news broke that he plans to formally end his campaign for the presidency, the former House speaker got a second kick in the teeth when the Internet fell in love with an asteroid-mining plan put forward by James Cameron and the Google guys. The very same Internet that ridiculed Gingrich for his promise to build a permanent moon base by 2020.

Gingrich must be asking himself, What’s the difference between this and my lunar base? When he waxed insane about outer space, we scoffed. When Cameron and Google talk the same way, we swoon. What gives?

Maybe it’s because Gingrich didn’t spin his plan right. He had no PowerPoint, and he got patriotic. He went Cold War, Kennedyesque. He foolishly gave it a deadline. “We will have the first permanent base on the moon and it will be American," Gingrich told fans in Florida in January.

Maybe he should have used the newer idiom of the innovation-and-commercialization classes: “We’ll have self-congratulatory Davos-style ‘ideas’ conferences till the cows come home; write many proposals; court billionaire investors with the promise of private space travel; sell tickets to stuff; make PowerPoint presentations for decades—and then let the whole thing quietly expire! Imaginary space missions forever!”

That’s been the message so far of the asteroid-mining plan put forward by Planetary Resources, the private venture in which the “Avatar” director and the Google bosses have conspicuously invested.

Mining asteroids for the good of “humanity,” using the money of Google honchos and the titanic imagination of director James Cameron: What a bold stroke of extraterrestrial derring-do that just might save the world! Twitter’s popping with it. It’s just the kind of big-hearted, idea-driven, Seattle-based, dollar-signs-in-eyes plan that the Twitterverse approves of. There’s Gizmodo: “This is going to be HUGE.” And Paul Allen: “an audacious idea & we need more of those”!

And what heaps of glittering resources will be disinterred from the galaxy by these altruistic and lavishly underwritten spaceman-miners? Petroleum, dare I ask, to empower earthlings demoralized at the pump? Clif bars to feed the starving? Nickel, to make more iPhones?! Or perhaps—let’s really dream now—a rich vein of mild, balanced, fair-trade coffee ore will be struck, as it snakes through a silicaceous gouge in 951 Gaspra or 243 Ida ...

It’s pretty to think so. And brood over. And watch CGI videos about. But, alas, no one has gotten quite so specific about the expected asteroidal quarry at Planetary Resources, a new and true asteroid-mining company, brainchild of Renaissance men Peter H. Diamandis and Eric Anderson. They talk mostly in broad strokes. “The resources of Earth pale in comparison to the wealth of the solar system,” says Anderson, who with Diamandis also founded the space tourism company Space Adventures.

As a marketing venture passing as an intergalactic plan to save us all, Planetary Resources is nothing if not the model Company of the Future. Planetary Resources exists, its literature tells us, to "expand Earth's natural resource base,” though anyone aiming to kick the company’s tires could be forgiven for seeing it as another way to collect checks from North American alpha egos for whom our sweet old earth doesn’t feel quite big enough.

In spite of its obscure timetable, hazy goals and odd provenance, Planetary Resources, which is indeed financed in part by Google bosses Eric Schmidt and Larry Page and by Cameron (who in a charming way tends to double down on the grandiose and the fishy-sounding), has seized the credulous attention of much of the mainstream news media. Bloggers seem to agree it’s just crazy enough to work.  Wired wrote mostly approvingly, only to radically reverse course and deem the venture premature. “Wired Science’s resident space historian David S. Portree,” Wired’s Adam Mann concluded, “thinks asteroid mining might make more sense when we have a more established space-based habitats with a different economy and better technology.” (Hey wait a minute: Wasn’t that Gingrich’s plan, to start with a moon base?)

But why wait, if you’re eager to start cutting ribbons and signing up investors? “The inaugural step, to be achieved in the next 18 to 24 months,” CBS News reported with a straight face, “would be launching the first in a series of private telescopes that would search for rich asteroid targets.”

In short, before you buy billion-dollar pieces of this Brooklyn Bridge: No one’s mining asteroids anytime soon. Not Google big shots. Not James Cameron. And when and if anyone ever does mine asteroids, they’re not going to be finding crude oil. Or a cure for human death, or a race of gentle friends. So let’s all relax.

The company speaks vaguely of asteroids long on platinum (to address the wedding-ring shortage?) and “real estate” (for the platinum-mining camps?). Otherwise, while admitting that actual mining is a ways off (two years before they start looking), the company peddles computer videos of what might happen in space, kind of, after a long, long, long time of studying those asteroids with telescopes.

The best comparison here is to the space tourism company, Space Adventures. Diamandis, in fact, made this comparison himself, when he introduced a crowd in Seattle to the Planetary Resources concept.

He told a tale of triumph. “Sixteen years ago,” he began, “we were launching this vision of private spaceflight when that was not the norm. And we had a lot of doubters—a lot of people who said it was impossible. But 16 years later there are thousands of people who are buying tickets and billions of dollars being invested. Any one of us can buy a ticket to go to space. I have two!”

They said we couldn’t send a rich man to space—those doubters—and yet 16 years later we have money and they have ... tickets!!

Want to buy one? Space Adventures has used its billions to send a whole seven people to the International Space Station.
I’m going to pass. As Diamandis might say, I’m a doubter.

As for the Gingrich plan, going to the moon on the government’s dime to demonstrate American supremacy? Maybe it’s not an original idea. But it sounds like a sure thing.