Newt Gingrich promises "US moon base" by 2020 to become the first US moon President

Forget Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine – Newt Gingrich wants to colonise the moon.

"By the end of my second term [2020], we will have the first permanent base on the moon and it will be American," the Republican US presidential hopeful told a cheering crowd in Cocoa, Florida, a town with links to the space industry.

A whopping budget deficit and cuts to the military do not seem to have dampened Gingrich’s astronomically expensive plans for a lunar colony with 13,000 residents.

"I want you to help me in Florida and across the country so you can someday say you were there the day it was announced that we’d have commercial space, moon colony and moving toward Mars," he said on Wednesday, comparing himself to John F Kennedy and the Wright Brothers [who invented airplanes].

“We clearly have a capacity that the Russians and the Chinese will never come anywhere close to matching."

Rachel Maddow reports in this video: