Triana

I’ve been doing some work on satellites lately. I’ve been meaning to make a comment about something for a while now, but I haven’t had anything except a snide remark come to mind. For whatever reason, at this point I’ve given up trying to come up with something substantive, so I’ll go with the snide remark.

Kind of an odd fact… Al Gore once came up with the idea for a satellite called Triana. It being Gore’s idea, there was enough political support to make it happen, and the thing got built. It being Gore’s idea, there was enough political opposition to prvent it from being launched – the Republican Congress actually issued a stop-work order, claiming it was a boondoggle, but the Republican Congress was wrong. The thing was finally completed, but they managed to prevent its launch – its sitting in a warehouse somewhere to this day. (Storage costs are not insignificant for this kind of thing.)

Here’s the wikipedia entry, and here’s something a bit more technical from NASA.

So now my snide remark… I was thinking about what a satellite proposed by would GW be like. My thought – it would have a built-in shovel.