I’m about 20 minutes late when I duck into Piecora’s Pizza on a typically rainy Monday night last October. Seeing no one around, I assume I missed the meeting. Democratic primary season is about to get underway, and I’m here in search of a candidate with big ideas for the White House. From what I’ve read about retired Gen. Wesley Clark, he might be that man. Tonight, Piecora’s is holding a Meetup, the hottest trend in grassroots political organizing.

Unfortunately, I’ve missed it.

A Claim on Cool
I first took a liking to Wes Clark a couple of weeks earlier. The faux-populism of the 2004 Democratic primary was making me feel dejected about the prospects for true progressivism in the coming year. These tough times call for a bold vision, and I had yet to see any coming from the other candidates. I was reading online, and I came across an article describing a town meeting in New Hampshire, where the general was campaigning for the 2004 Democratic presidential nomination. According to reports, in response to a question about his support for NASA, he said: “I still believe in E=mc², but I can’t believe that in all of human history, we’ll never ever be able to go beyond the speed of light to reach where we want to go. I happen to believe that mankind can do it.”

His head-turning response shot across the Internet at (nearly) light speed. Op-ed cartoons featured the general in a time machine; Wired wondered whether he was a futurist at heart; and most physicists had a good, long laugh, except for the few at NASA who were suddenly dreading the possibility that they’d have to deliver on Clark’s outlandish promise. After all, The New Republic’s Michael Crowley had written recently: “I badly want to see Wesley Clark a conquering Democratic hero. I just can’t shake the notion that the guy’s a bit of an oddball—a smarter Ross Perot with medals.”

Oddball or not, I was, like I said, ready for a candidate with a bold agenda. For months I had watched President Bush cherry-pick at progressivism, moving such non-Republican agenda items as education, Medicare expansion and AIDS-relief funds through Congress with breathtaking efficiency. What irked me was that he tended to do it just enough to grab headlines but without doling out the necessary funds to make his initiatives work. We in the opposition party were left foaming at the mouth (often using former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean as a rabid proxy), reduced to being isolationist, protectionist, budget-balancing babies just to feel like we were opposing something. I hated it. I’m a liberal interventionist, a free-trade apologist and a government-expanding socialist. Bush had taken all the fun out of being a liberal.

“Liberals used to be funny,” observed conservative columnist Tucker Carlson in Rolling Stone. “They edited magazines like National Lampoon. They had a claim on cool. Then something happened. They became sour and earnest and neurotic about secondhand smoke.” Progressivism needed a big idea if it were to recapture the political space in this country, that is, if it were to be “cool” again.

Inventing the Ribbon
Which is what made Wes Clark’s comment about faster-than-light (FTL) travel so fantastic. Finally, a Democratic candidate was saying something so bold and outlandish, Bush wouldn’t dare trump it. Progressive politics are in retreat in America, and anyone who lived through John F. Kennedy and the Apollo Project of the 1960s will tell you that a renewed commitment to space exploration is a sure-fire way to bring them roaring back.

According to this argument, if you can convince people that the future is a wonderful place, they’re more likely to trust you when you call for other progressive reforms. So a big shake-up in the space program had to happen. Clark’s ideas about FTL travel may have been over-the-top, but the current program, anchored by the aging shuttle (which The New York Times recently compared to a ’76 Dodge Dart), wasn’t nearly enough. Searching for something bold and outlandish, yet eminently doable, I came across a truly innovative idea: the space elevator.

The space elevator is still fantasy, but one that’s got more than a few serious scientists very intrigued. The idea is simple: A satellite in Earth’s orbit connects to a docking station on an island in the South Pacific via a thin, superstrong ribbon cable. The elevator moves up and down the ribbon, bringing cargo (and people) 22,000 feet into geosynchronous orbit without a single rocket engine required. Think of it as the world’s longest clothesline.

Right now, it hinges on the development of the ribbon, which will be made out of carbon nanotubes, an experimental technology that’s the result of rearranging carbon molecules. Carbon nanotubes can be several times stronger than steel, at a fraction of the weight. The space elevator had all the elements for a perfect progressive policy launching pad: a touch of sci-fi (the novelist Arthur C. Clarke had written about a space elevator in 1979), a healthy dose of Manifest Destiny and a galaxy’s worth of taxing and spending (the first elevator could cost as much as $12 billion). For all of these reasons, the elevator has to happen.

Mining for Gold
America in 2004 is a reactionary place. Certainly, 9/11 plays a part in our increased anxiety. Yet it’s essential to remember that our response to 9/11, the war on terrorism, is a war against the forces of reaction embodied by Afghanistan under the Taliban. At its root is a struggle between open, democratic societies and the fundamentalist, reactionary ones. Progressivism has never been so necessary. To win the war, open societies, led by the United States, need to be on top of the world again, which is quite literally what the elevator would provide.

This is what Kennedy was searching for when he committed America to landing a man on the moon by the end of the 1960s. “We go into space,” he said, “because whatever mankind must undertake, free men must fully share.” Back then, it was about proving we were better than Sputnik. Now, it’s about reaffirming America’s unique place among the world’s nations. Add to that the need to get our space program rolling again after last year’s Columbia shuttle disaster, and all the pieces are in place for a new space initiative.

If our desire to beat the commies makes up half of our push to the stars, then our age-old infatuation with exploration must make up the other half. America is a country founded by explorers, and capitalism can’t survive without new markets in which to expand. One could chart a straight line from Columbus to Manifest Destiny and the Oregon Trail to the Apollo and Gemini missions. Perhaps the one difference, and the reason why space exploration’s support is more tenuous than it ought to be, is that space exploration, at least thus far, has been conducted without dreams of striking it rich. No one’s discovered gold on the moon yet, and that may be why the NASA budget remains controversial: There’s no compelling market reason for space exploration.

Furthermore, Americans are often hesitant of any big-government initiative that doesn’t immediately affect the bottom line. On the campaign trail, Gen. Clark often says: “Americans are not big-government people. But we recognize there are problems we can’t solve by ourselves, like education and health care.” Even the space-crazed general seems to realize that Americans might be reluctant to fund a push to space that lacks any tangible (read: monetary) rewards. Which brings me back to the space elevator, which has the potential not only to bring outer space to the masses, but also serves a significant business need: getting cargo into orbit dirt-cheap. Progressive, capitalist-friendly and technically feasible, the elevator is the total package.

A Ticket to the New Frontier
My research on the space elevator led me to Bradley Edwards, who founded a company in Seattle, HighLift Systems, to develop the idea. Edwards became intrigued in the idea of the space elevator years ago, when he was researching cost-effective ways to get to space at Los Alamos National Laboratory. He recently left HighLift to work for the Institute for Scientific Research, where he’d gotten some funding from NASA to work on the elevator. If the space elevator is going to get off the ground, Edwards is going to be the one who gets it there. But what may ultimately provide the public support for the project is that this could be the first NASA endeavor to be a moneymaker.

“NASA doesn’t need a grand ambition, it needs a cheap, reliable means of getting back and forth to low-Earth orbit,” says Gregg Easterbrook, author of The Progress Paradox. Which is why the elevator is fundamentally appealing. Right now, the cost of launching a pound of payload into orbit—satellites, telescopes—is huge, around $40,000. The elevator could do it for about $200. That would give it instant market viability, because telecom companies currently pay exorbitant fees to get their long-distance satellites into orbit.

Add marketability to a space program, and a lot of critics will start to back off. “In short,” writes Kevin Kelliher in Wired, “Edwards’ lift could do for the new century what railroads did for the 1800s: slash the cost of a ticket to the new frontier.” Of course, the fact that it’s designed to carry payload and not people could be what sinks it. Big visions for space exploration tend to involved people, not cargo. “Everyone knows that unmanned scientific missions are more useful and less costly, but manned missions are there for PR purposes,” Mark Smith, a professor at the University of Washington’s Center for American Politics and Public Policy, tells me.

But even then, there’s hope. There’s no reason why the elevator couldn’t send people on a cheap vacation to the International Space Station, which could well turn into the world’s first orbiting hotel. How cheap? Well, at $200 per pound, “go weigh yourself and multiply,” writes Kelliher.

Validation
Soon after my brief brush with the Clark campaign, I read something in The Washington Post that confirms Smith’s observations: Vice President Dick Cheney is visiting NASA, trying to see whether he can put together a new, visionary space program that won’t bust the budget. Within weeks, news starts to leak, and by December, President Bush himself is embracing the new initiative, calling for the establishment of a permanent base on the moon leading to a permanent home on Mars by 2030.

I suppose I shouldn’t flatter myself too much. If I had noticed, all by myself, that the stars were aligned for a bold new space program, then it shouldn’t surprise me that the Bush folks came up with it as well. They’re pretty smart. Still, the space elevator is pushing forward, and the Institute for Scientific Research expects to start work on the nanotube ribbon in five or six years. Reacting to Bush’s space program, Gen. Clark, who claims to have harbored dreams of being an astronaut since he was young, has also said that he would commit to landing a man on Mars by 2020. As for the moon, he says, “I don’t want to go someplace we’ve already been.”

Will Bush’s program succeed in evoking Kennedy’s America-first spirit, as our country embarks on another prolonged, generation-long war against another nefarious ism? It’s clearly too soon to tell. At best, “a manned space program is part of the whole package,” Smith tells me. “Bread-and-butter issues like the economy are still the first priority.” Which is true. But it’s clear from the attention being given to the new space program that it’s a very important part of the package. In America, where progress, exploration and innovation are woven so tightly into our economic prosperity, our founding documents and our collective spirit, the drive spaceward will always be too tempting to resist.