While Newt Gingrich seeks to woo Florida voters with lots of big talk about dedicating 10 percent of NASA's budget to prizes and establishing a permanent U.S. base on the moon by his second term as president, Mitt Romney has come up with a whole lot of nothing. Further, he may end up alienating one of the people endorsing him for President.

On at least two occasions during last week's presidential debates, Romney said he wants to bring together experts from NASA, the military, business, and universities to define America's goals for space and figure out how to fund everything.  

It's not the sort of talk that impresses the locals along the Space Coast.

"In short, he has no plan," Florida Today editor/columnist John Kelley writes. "The U.S. doesn’t need another blue-ribbon task force to repeat the paralysis by analysis of the past eight years. Likely end: another dust-gathering study and little to show for." 

Kelly has often said the last thing the space program needs is Yet Another Study, having been studied and re-studied across the last two decades through Democratic and Republican administrations, with each study typically resulting in a change of direction and no forward progress.

However, Romney has a bigger problem among hardcore space policy followers trying to reconcile comments made at his last debate appearance and those made by one of the people endorsing him for President.

Establishing a permanent lunar base by 2020 -- as Newt Gingrich proposed -- would be "an enormous expense," said Romney at a January 26 debate. "If I had a business executive come to me and say they wanted to spend a few hundred billion dollars to put a colony on the Moon, I’d say, ‘You’re fired. ’ The idea that corporate America wants to go off to the Moon and build a colony there, it may be a big idea but it’s not a good idea.” 

On January 27, the Romney campaign released "Leaders in America's Space Program Write Open Letter in Support of Mitt Romney." Among the eight people signing it is Michael Griffin, NASA's last Administrator.   The last time Griffin was up on Capitol Hill with letter co-signer astronaut Gene Cernan, on September 23, the two engaged in a lot of crying over the canceled Constellation program while Griffin threw out the idea that the U.S. government needs to establish a permanent lunar base.

How the Romney campaign squares being endorsed by a moon-base building Griffin is not clear, but Tea Party in Space (TPIS) President Andrew Glasser has put up a video clip parsing another part of Griffin's testimony at the September 23  House Space Subcommittee hearing and a damning discussion of Griffin's tenure as NASA Administrator.    Romney has repair work to do if he wants TPIS support in the future.

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