Politics Kills Spacecraft Launch

Electrawn writes: "Partisan politics became involved in an effort to kill the Triana spacecraft. Triana's mission is to sit in Lagrange 1, a spot between the Sun and Earth and take pictures of Earth as a whole and monitor climate changes. Yahoo has this AP Story on what happened, and also, here is a MSNBC version via the Washington Post. It seems former Presidential candidate Al Gore had something to do with inspiring the space craft, which made it a target for the Republican Congress."

Comments

More background

[SEWilco]

This Spaceviews article was a thorough description at the time the idea was proposed. The idea came to Gore at night, while he was not fully conscious.

I thought Slashdot had discussed this satellite, and the major points were that it would need an 8-inch telescope due to the distance, and existing weather satellites already give a better 24-hour view of weather patterns. Triana would have to be 1.6 million kilometers from Earth, rather than the 36,000 kilometers of a weather satellite's Clarke orbit. A 24-hour sunlit view could be created from the existing satellite images, as was mentioned in the link in the parent article.