Bring Back GoreSat!

Al Gore may not have invented the Internet, he might not have even made the most convincing documentary on climate change, but the guy's heart certainly seems to be in the right place. At the end of the last century (less than a decade back) NASA scientists, jaded at the prospect of putting folks on the moon (been there, done that), came up with the idea of the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) - aka Discover. Gracious, these acronyms get cheesier.

The idea was for DSCOVR to stream a live colour image of the blue marble we call home from about a million miles away and help model how climate change is affecting us. The nickname "Goresat" comes from the politician's support for the project since inception. Gore wanted to steam the data live onto the Internet 24/7 so we could watch in awe at the jaw-dropping beauty of Earth from space.

But the Bush "administration" put the clog in. DSCOVR would have put a smoking gun into America's hand proving that its reliance on oil is fucking with the planet - and Dubya, a god-bothering climate-change denying idiot and his cronies weren't going to let that happen on his eight year snooze watch.

Writing for the BBC, Dr Christopher Riley curator of the online Apollo film archive project, Footagevault, says:

"Today, the satellite still rests in storage at Nasa's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland awaiting a more enlightened presidency to give it a green light. Perhaps, under a new administration, and to mark the 40th anniversary of humankind's first vision of the Earth from space, that time has now come."

We can only wait and hope.