Gore loved The Blue Marble. He hung a picture of it in his office. But then, as today, getting new versions of the Blue Marble—pictures of what the entire sunlit planet looked like today—wasn’t easy. We don’t have astronauts going back and forth to the moon anymore.

Instead, we make Photoshopped versions. Modern-day Blue Marble-like photos have to be stitched together from composite images. (The default iPhone background is one of these composites.) True whole-Earth photographs are rare. The most recent Blue Marble-like photos I can think of were captured in October by a Chinese probe and December by a Japanese weather satellite.

Gore wanted a satellite specifically tasked with taking a picture of the whole Earth. And he wanted a feed from that satellite to live-stream to the Internet.

2. Internally, NASA called it “GoreSat.”

GORESAT. I mean. Come on.

Gore met with the director of NASA, and the director estimated that the entire project—satellite, live-feed, bandwidth at 1990s prices—could work for only tens of millions of dollars. The proposal went forward.

3. DSCOVR will sit in the center of a solar gravitational gire called the first Lagrangian Point.

One of Gore’s ideas for this satellite was that it would sit at the first Lagrangian point.

Lagrangian points—or Lagrange points, or libration points (they have a lot of names)—are a little-known phenomenon of orbiting planets and moons. They work something like calm points in the galactic firmament, kept stable by gyres and eddies, but they’re created by invisible waves millions of miles across.

They are small areas in a solar or planetary system where something can maintain its position without exerting a lot of power, because two other bodies are exerting equal amounts of gravitational force on it. There’s one of these—called L1—between the Earth and the Sun.

That’s where DSCOVR will sit.

(Other Lagrangian points are located on the far side of Earth; on the far side of the sun; and within Earth’s orbit, 60° above and behind the planet. Lagrangian points aren’t specific to Earth, either: Saturn’s moon Calypso trails its moon Tethys at the L5 point.)

We already have one satellite at L1, called ACE, which monitors solar weather. DSCOVR will monitor solar weather too.

4. And then Goresat was postponed!

Except it wasn’t called Goresat—or DSCOVR—at the time. It was called Triana, after Rodrigo de Triana, the first of Christopher Columbus’s men to spot North America.

It also wasn’t just a live-feed of Earth. By that time, the project had grown to include new views of Earth, including special sensors that would monitor important climate variables. But Triana was still attached to the vice president’s name, reputation, and imminent presidential campaign, and Republicans weren’t having it. Wrote The New York Times in June 1999:

On May 13, the Republican-controlled House Science Committee voted 21 to 18 along party lines to send a $41.2 billion, three-year NASA authorization bill to the full House without Triana financing. The measure included an amendment by Representative Dave Weldon, Republican of Florida, who called Triana ''a multimillion-dollar screen saver'' and ''tripe science,'' that shifted money for the project to other research.

The satellite was eventually built and ready for launch. But under the incoming Bush administration, its mission was postponed and it was put in a closet.