At long last: Al Gore's satellite dream blasts off

Traci Watson | Special for USA TODAY

Al Gore's presidential career never left the ground. But a controversial space mission he dreamed up will soon take flight – literally — after more than 15 years of being ridiculed and stalled.

A satellite inspired by Gore's ideas -- originally slated to blast off Sunday but finally did late Wednesday -- is bound for a spot a million miles from Earth. From there the satellite, called the Deep Space Climate Observeratory or DSCOVR for short, will beam back pictures of the sunlit orb of our planet suspended in space, as Gore proposed nearly two decades ago.

DSCOVR's ride to the cosmos has been bumpy. Republican critics, deriding it as "nutty" and a "boondoggle," sneeringly refer to it as "Goresat." Congress repeatedly tried to kill it. NASA stashed it in a warehouse in 2001 for indefinite storage.

Now, after a $95 million refurbishment, DSCOVR is about to blast off. It will gather data on space weather and the Earth's reflectivity, and it will also snap multiple pictures of the Earth to be sent home daily for humans to admire, much as Gore sought back in 1998.

"I always thought that one way or another, it was going to get up there," said Gore, who plans to be present at Cape Canaveral for the liftoff. "It would've been better years ago, but that's ancient history."

Most space missions are born of scientific curiosity, but DSCOVR sprang from a bout of insomnia in early 1998. Unable to sleep, Gore said he was struck with an audacious idea: launch a satellite that would beam back to Earth a continuous live image of the planet hanging in the blackness of space.

"You know, it took 17 years! Seventeen years to get something done that was supposed to be done in a couple of years," said Francisco Valero, an emeritus research scientist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the mission's lead scientist until his team was disbanded. "Now it's happening. … Isn't that great?"

In short order after his idea, Gore announced his plan for a satellite called Triana, after a sailor in Columbus's fleet. NASA moved to beef up the mission's scientific credentials, but it was too late. Triana became a Republican football of a satellite.

"Unfortunately, we could never shake off that political perception of the mission, that this is all about politics," said Ghassem Asrar, a NASA official at the time and now director of the Joint Global Change Research Institute in College Park, Md.

The mission was nothing but a "multimillion-dollar screensaver," Rep. James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., scoffed in 1999. After George W. Bush moved into the White House, the vending machine-sized spacecraft was parked under a stairwell at a NASA facility in Maryland, awaiting a launch date that never seemed to arrive.

Part of Triana's troubles stemmed from mundane logistical realities. The satellite was designed to rocket into orbit on the space shuttle, which was overbooked in the 2000s. But Asrar points out that if the mission hadn't been so politically tainted, it might have had a better chance of winning a shuttle slot.

DSCOVR's resurrection began with another spacecraft's impending death.

The NASA satellite called ACE is the only spacecraft that can provide an early, real-time warning of disastrous solar particles streaming toward Earth. Unfortunately, ACE is also long past its expiration date.

Casting around for a replacement, federal officials remembered Gore's brainchild, which already carried instruments that would allow it to take over ACE's sentry role. So in 2012, the satellite, by then renamed DSCOVR, was hauled out of storage.

Engineers rushed to replace decayed or out-of-date equipment. Scientists such as the University of Michigan's Justin Kasper, who worked on DSCOVR a decade ago, dug up their old notebooks for guidance.

"Fortunately, I didn't just toss those out," Kasper said. "I couldn't count how many times they saved us."

The mission will provide essential warnings of incoming solar particles as well as data that will make climate-change models more accurate. The information comes at a price, though: thanks partly to delays, DSCOVR's original cost of roughly $75 million has risen to $340 million.

The changes to Gore's original proposal don't placate Sensenbrenner, who calls the spacecraft a politically driven waste of money.

"You don't need to spend (millions) to watch as the world turns," Sensenbrenner said. "Barack Obama is trying to paper over a mistake Al Gore made. ... This project should be permanently shelved, as I thought it was a decade ago."

If Gore feels vindicated, he won't say so. He said only that he feels "gratitude, really and truly, to the scientists and engineers who have kept the faith."

That would include former lead scientist Valero, one of DSCOVR's most outspoken champions. Now 78, he'll watch the launch with his grandsons. But physicist Alan Lazarus, who helped design DSCVR's solar-particle sensor, will be absent. He died in March at age 82.

Lazarus was "pleased" to know his instrument would fly after all, Kasper said.

"I would've loved for him to see the launch," Kasper said. "It's been a long and exciting ride."

(UPDATED TO INCLUDE REVISED LAUNCH DATE.)