The dream of a politician some call a prophet now sits in a warehouse ... but may still have lessons to teach.
Late one February evening in 1998, during the halcyon days of the Clinton administration’s second term, when a stained blue dress was our only source of national drama, Al Gore awoke from a dream with an idea for a satellite that would change the way we see the earth.
Gore’s idea was to place a satellite at a sweet spot known to astronomers as a Langrangian Point. The particular Langrangian Point that Gore had in mind—L1—is about 900,000 miles from the earth in the direction of the sun.
What makes the spot so sweet is that fact that it is a place where the pull of the earth and the pull of the sun are in perfect equilibrium. Gliding along the narrow ridge where the rim of the earth’s gravity well intersects the vastly larger gravity well of the sun, a satellite positioned at L1 could offer a continuous view of the entire sunlit side of the earth.
That was the appeal for Gore. He hoped that by beaming a real-time image of our home planet suspended against the backdrop of space to the Internet, the satellite would enhance our appreciation for the earth and change the way we relate to it.
Gore decided to name the satellite Triana, after Rodrigo de Triana, the man who reportedly made the first sighting of the “New World” from the crow’s nest of La Pinta, one of the ships under the command of Christopher Columbus in 1492.
After Gore pitched his idea to NASA, Daniel Goldin, the space agency’s administrator at the time, issued a call for proposals. Apart from the educational value of the project, what science could be done from L1?
“We said, ‘Let’s look at the earth the way astronomers would look at another planet,’” recalls Francisco Valero, director of the Atmospheric Research Laboratory at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography.
Valero explains that all of the satellites currently deployed to study earth’s climate orbit a few hundred to a couple thousand miles above the planet’s surface. That means that they are only able to image a fraction of the globe at a time.
This “a-synoptic” view of the earth makes coming up with a comprehensive portrait of our home world and its climate a lot like assembling the pieces of a very complicated puzzle.
“You have to invent mathematical models to try to reconcile differences from point to point,” Valero says.
Triana—which was renamed Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) after the proposal from Valero and his team got the nod from NASA—was intended to change all that.
“DSCOVR was designed to measure the solar energy budget of the entire planet,” Valero says. “The output of the sun would be recorded in one direction, and the amount of solar energy reflected by the planet as infrared radiation would be measured in the other direction.”
The key to measuring global warming is known as albedo, the ratio between the amount of sunlight reaching the planet and the amount of energy radiated back into space. And the satellite inspired by Al Gore’s dream was to be the first scientific instrument to measure the earth’s albedo synoptically.
That is, until a bitterly contested presidential election, terrorist attacks on American soil, a protracted war in the Middle East, and an abrupt shift in the executive branch’s attitude toward climate change intervened.
DSCOVR (left) was completed in 2001 and scheduled for launch in 2003. Amid hostility from Congress—some congressional Republicans scoffed at the notion of financing “Al Gore’s screensaver”—and shifting priorities at the space agency, the mission was cancelled and the satellite was consigned to a warehouse at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland.
Though the former vice president’s association with DSCOVR didn’t help the satellite’s prospects, other developments related to the scientific study of climate change suggest that the fate of the project would have been cast into doubt regardless of its origins.
As the new administration began to chart out its ambitious plans for a return to the moon and a manned expedition to Mars, satellite missions designed to measure wind currents, atmospheric temperature, global precipitation patterns, and the volume of aerosols in the atmosphere were cancelled or postponed to finance the development of powerful new propulsion systems.
Early in the Bush administration’s second term, James Hansen, head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said in interviews with the Washington Post and the New York Times that the White House had edited government documents to downplay the urgency of the threats posed by climate change. Then, in 2006, the phrase “to understand and protect our home planet” was deleted from NASA’s mission statement.
While DSCOVR’s patrimony and the dominant American political culture’s enmity toward climate science have kept the satellite earthbound, the vigilance of a handful of scientists and journalists has also managed to save DSCOVR from oblivion.
A report from the National Academy of Sciences described the project’s mission as vital to the expansion of our knowledge about the earth’s energy budget, and Robert Park, a physicist at the University of Maryland, has played the role of Cassandra—“Triana is terminated, but global warming is not”—on the op-ed page of the New York Times.
At the urging of European scientists, the governments of France and Ukraine have offered to launch DSCOVR—a proposition well within the technological capabilities of nearly a dozen nations and, at a cost of about $50 million, hardly a budget-buster for any of them.
NASA declined.
But perhaps the satellite’s most dogged advocate has been Mitchell Anderson, a Canadian blogger and environmental activist who has closely monitored the current administration’s reshaping of NASA and petitioned—unsuccessfully—for access to DSCOVR-related White House documents under the Freedom of Information Act.
“After waiting six months,” Anderson reported on his blog this May, “thirteen documents were located—and all were withheld from release.”
As with so many other knotty problems associated with the current administration, the ultimate fate of DSCOVR will have to be resolved by the next generation of political leaders. And while legislators in the Democrat-controlled Congress have attempted to reinsert the satellite into political discussion—before the congressional recess in August, the House passed a NASA budget for 2009 that includes an imperative to develop a plan for the disposition of DSCOVR—advocacy for the project is a priority for only a few lawmakers, and the outcome of the debate is far from certain.
In fact, the House bill allows for the possibility that the spacecraft could be dismantled and its parts used for other missions, and the current Senate version of the bill, which has yet to reach the floor of the Senate for debate, omits any mention of DSCOVR.
Several other earth-science projects included in the legislation passed by the House are also absent from the Senate’s version of the future NASA budget.)
At this point, one of the most likely outcomes of the largely behind-the-scenes movement around DSCOVR—perhaps even prior to any congressional decision about the satellite—is the repurposing of the spacecraft to serve military ends.
The Air Force is currently in discussion with the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, part of the mandate for which is the monitoring of space weather, to determine DSCOVR’s potential utility as a beacon to alert the military of incoming waves of charged particles ejected by the sun during solar storms.
These waves, which can disrupt electrical systems, progress through the solar system at roughly a million miles an hour. Thus, in the event of a powerful solar storm, a shielded beacon positioned at L1—900,000 miles from the earth—could transmit a digital radio signal traveling at the speed of light, which would give the military about 45 minutes to power down sensitive reconnaissance satellites and recall robotic drones that ply the upper atmosphere.
Al Gore’s dream-child, a radically democratic experiment in technological transparency that his opponents decry as nothing more than an overpriced screensaver, could well become a sort of interplanetary fuse-box protecting a growing network of orbiting surveillance hardware.
Such a prospect reminds us that, for all that we know of the universe, it’s remarkable how little we actually see. Our technological gaze is mainly inward-looking, though the secrecy surrounding that technology suggests that its direction is an often expression of paranoia rather than self-reflection.
The general tendencies of our collective behavior are to be on the lookout for enemies, to defer to leaders who are willing to exert authority through violence and to vilify anyone who suggests that we’re soiling our own nest. These are the marks of a civilization in decline.
The lesson of a satellite in limbo is that the continuation of this decline is probable but by no means inevitable. Curiosity still flourishes where paranoia wants to take root, and a concern for all of humanity still prevails in our scientific culture, even as it is under siege in our politics.
Our best chance to change this situation for the better is for us to begin to view ourselves—and our world— as DSCOVER would if it is given the chance: synoptically, seeing not just the parts but the whole.
Nick Street is a Buddhist monk at the Hazy Moon Zen Center in Los Angeles. He studied Christian ethics at Oberlin College and Emory University and recently received an M.A. in print journalism from the University of Southern California. His writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, LA Weekly, Religion Dispatches, and the Revealer.
