Vice President Al Gore phoned NASA chief Daniel S. Goldin to propose an idea that, he said, jolted him out of sleep in the wee hours of the morning: a small orbiting satellite that would provide a live video image, continuously available on television and the Internet, of the earth framed against the blackness of space. Goldin dispatched first two, then more staffers to look into Gore's idea, which he estimates would cost about $20 million and "definitely" less than $50 million.

[Ed.: According to Aerospace Daily, the Russian space program has a different naval to gaze at, planning to land a meter-high statue of the Buddha on the moon and, in a separate spacecraft, a camera that would beam pictures of the statue back to earth.]

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