Newt Gingrich promises permanent base on Moon by 2020.

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, says the United States will have a permanent manned colony on the moon by 2020 if he is elected president. Gingrich said this during a speech in the city of Cocoa on Florida's Space Coast.

Gingrich said that his administration would develop a next generation propulsion system to take astronauts to Mars. Gingrich, according to Space.com, said: "By the end of my second term, we will have the first permanent base on the moon, and it will be American."

Reuters reports Gingrich said: "We will have commercial near-Earth activities that include science, tourism and manufacturing, because it is in our interest to acquire so much experience in space that we clearly have a capacity that the Chinese and the Russians will never come anywhere close to matching."Gingrich's administration would foster emergence of a vibrant commercial spaceflight industry to facilitate the goals. He administration would stimulate space development, especially private commercial flights, by a system of prizes. For instance, he said he would establish a $10 billion prize for the first company to get astronauts to Mars. Gingrich told a roomful of cheering supporters: "I am sick of being told we have to be timid, and I am sick of being told we have to be limited to technologies that are 50 years old."

Gingrich's emphasis on developing private enterprise participation in spaceflights would involve a budget cut for NASA. According to Reuters, Gingrich says he would use 10 percent of NASA's $18 billion budget to fund the prize money to spur the development of the private commercial flights industry. He said, during a meeting of aerospace executives and community leaders after the rally: "I'm prepared to invest the prestige of the presidency in communicating and building a nationwide movement in favor of space. If we do it right, it'll be wild and it will be just the most fun you've ever seen."

Many U.S. space entrepreneurs have been voicing their concerns about the state of the country's space industry. With the retirement of NASA's space shuttle program last July, the U.S. depends on Russia to move its astronauts to and from the International Space Station and Space.com reports things are expected to remain the same until about 2017 when private U.S. space vehicles begin coming online.