Newt Gingrich surprised a lot of people when he put a permanent moon settlement out there for discussion in the 2012 Presidential race. Is this an idea whose time has come? Phil and Stephen discuss with special guests Brian Wang and Rand Simberg.  About Our Guests   Rand Simberg is an expert on space technology and policy, particularly with regard to NASA and commercial human spaceflight.  He has published lengthy essays on these topics at The New Atlantis, and done many columns for Fox News, Popular Mechanics, AOL News, and Pajamas Media.     Brian Wang is a long-time futurist and writer of some 8000 articles covering a host of future-related topics on nextbigfuture.com. Nextbigfuture is a top 5 science website (per Technorati) and has over one million page views per month (RSS feed reads and regular website).