Satellite launching from Cape sparked '90s fight

With the new millennium approaching, then-Vice President Al Gore proposed a small satellite whose view of the entire Earth would be shared on the Internet and help inspire a new generation to protect the planet.

More than 15 years later, the spacecraft born from Gore's vision has emerged from a decade exiled in storage with a new name and mission, and is poised to shed its partisan history with a sunset launch Sunday from Cape Canaveral.

"This is probably one of the more unusual stories of a NASA science mission," said Dave Weldon of Indialantic, a former Republican congressman who was an opponent of the mission critics once mocked as "GoreSat."

The former vice president is expected to attend the planned 6:10 p.m. Sunday blastoff of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket with the mission he named Triana — for the Christopher Columbus lookout who spotted the New World in 1492 — now called the Deep Space Climate Observatory, or DSCOVR.

Gore representatives this week did not respond to a message seeking his comment on the launch.

Years after the mission first sparked political debate over its science value, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says it will play a critical role monitoring space weather that can damage satellites, power grids and other infrastructure.

"The effort to bring DSCOVR to the launch pad has been quite a journey," said Doug Whiteley, deputy director of the Office of Systems Development at NOAA's Satellite and Information Service.

In March 1998, Gore imagined Triana by 2000 providing dramatic images of the distant, sunlit Earth that would have an impact similar to that of Apollo 8's "Earth Rising" in 1968 and Apollo 17's "Blue Marble" in 1972.

Making the high-definition images available around the clock on the Internet and TV, he said, "will awaken a new generation to the environment and educate millions of children around the globe."

The mission was to cost no more than $50 million.

But a year later, NASA's inspector general released a critical report suggesting the agency reassess the mission.

According to the report, the mission's concept had not been subjected to the usual scrutiny, and its cost had grown to nearly $100 million as NASA broadened its science goals.

"A low-cost mission primarily aimed at inspiring and educating students and the public has become a larger, higher-cost science mission with, as yet, minimal educational content," the report said.

The inspector general went as far as to suggest an alternative "Virtual Triana" mission that would organize online "the vast array of satellite pictures of the Earth already publicly available."

Congressional Republicans including Weldon considered Triana a waste of money.

"We're spending all these millions of dollars on just a visual, and it was Al Gore's idea," recalled Weldon, a physician who left the U.S. House in 2008 after 14 years representing Florida's 15th district. "I remember feeling at the time that this was an inappropriate use of taxpayer dollars. It was for all intents and purposes going to be a screen saver."

Congress ordered a National Academy of Sciences review that validated the mission's science merits, and decided that any launch shouldn't happen until after the 2000 presidential election.

Those delays bumped Triana from its planned late 2000 launch from Kennedy Space Center aboard the space shuttle Columbia.

Budgets then reduced the number of planned shuttle flights, which were focused on assembling the fledgling International Space Station.

In 2001, after George W. Bush defeated Gore to become president, NASA moved Triana into a storage box at the Goddard Space Flight Facility in Maryland, with no promise that it would ever launch.

Seven years later, NOAA asked NASA to test the spacecraft to see if still worked.

It did, and the weather agency determined it would be an ideal replacement and upgrade for the aging NASA research satellite it has relied on to generate alerts about potentially dangerous solar storms.

"Every major public infrastructure system, including satellites, GPS, aviation and the electric power industry is at risk from space weather," said Douglas Biesecker, chief scientist at NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center in Boulder, Colo. "As our society has grown more dependent on technology, space weather forecasting has become more important."

As originally planned, the satellite will orbit the sun nearly a million miles from Earth, at a stable point in space where the sun's and Earth's gravity cancel each other out.

When a blast of solar wind hits the spacecraft, forecasters will be able to give satellite or grid operators up to an hour's notice if they should take steps to protect their systems.

A pair of NASA science instruments also will support climate research with measurements of ozone, aerosols, cloud heights, vegetation properties and radiation.

NASA in 2012 pulled the renamed spacecraft from storage to get it ready for flight.

"We were fairly fortunate," said Whiteley. "There really weren't a whole lot of major issues that they encountered in terms of refurbishing the spacecraft for this mission."

The spacecraft and its instruments are essentially the same as from the start, but the mission has a different focus with NOAA now in charge.

The years in storage and the refurbishment effort increased the mission's cost to $340 million, including the Falcon 9 rocket.

Gore's early involvement will remain central to the spacecraft's legacy, but the political fight over it has long since subsided.

"It's a different situation now," said Weldon. "If this administration and this Congress wants to fund, let's do it."

Contact Dean at 321-242-3668 or jdean@floridatoday.com. Follow him on Twitter at @flatoday_jdean

Sunday Launch

Rocket: SpaceX Falcon 9

Mission: Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR)

Launch time: 6:10 p.m. Sunday

Launch window: Instantaneous

Launch complex: 40 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station

Weather: 90 percent "go"

Visit floridatoday.com for live countdown updates starting at 5 p.m. Sunday.