GoreSat to be launched finally

Talk about a useless project -- from the Associated Press:

Satellite shelved after 2000 election to now fly
President Barack Obama is proposing dusting off and finally launching an old environmental satellite championed by Al Gore but shelved a dozen years by his 2000 rival George W. Bush.

Obama proposed Wednesday spending nearly $35 million in his 2014 budget to refurbish a satellite, nicknamed GoreSat by critics, that's been sitting in storage after it was shelved in 2001, months after Bush took office. It cost about $100 million by then with NASA's internal auditors faulting its cost increases.

In 1998, Gore, then vice president, proposed the idea of a satellite that would head nearly 1 million miles out in deep space in a special gravity balancing area between Earth and the Sun. The satellite would gaze at Earth, beam down a continuous picture of our planet and take what scientists said was needed climate change measurements.

I remember it well -- it was stupid science then and is stupid science now. It will sit at the L1 Lagrange point and beam hi-resolution photos back to Earth. L1 is between the Earth and the Sun so the image will always be fully illuminated. The joke of it is that the Earth observing instruments are being taken out and solar instruments are being installed. The upshot is that Gore will not get his precious screensaver...