It’s important to note that NASA did not have to ask scientists to propose experiments for STS-107. All of the NASA’s STS-107 experiments had already passed the peer review process and were accepted for flight and were just waiting for a flight with enough space.
If STS-107 didn’t exist then most of the experiments would have eventually flown, one or two at a time on shuttle missions with spare space. That would have been far more difficult to accomplish with most shuttle flights to the space station already loaded to their maximum capacity. Other STS-107 payloads needed a dedicated science mission for technical or logistics reasons.
One of the more unusual arrangements for the STS-107 mission was with the European Space Agency. NASA needed a Guppy aircraft with an oversize cargo hold to transport large space station components to Florida for launch. Europe had a Guppy available and wanted to fly experiments on STS-107 and a barter was negotiated. The Guppy is a modified Boeing 377 Stratocruiser with a 25 foot diameter cargo bay. Here the Guppy is shown delivering a large space station component to the Kennedy Space Center.
The camera would be positioned at a gravitationally stable location between the Earth and the Sun to return real-time high-resolution natural color images of the Earth, which could be downloaded from the Internet. It was a nice idea, but something Earth observation scientists weren't excited about. The existing GOES weather satellites accomplished much of what Gore proposed, and while natural color images do look pretty, false-color images, with colors invisible to the human eye, have far more scientific content. Still, the vice-president is the chair of the National Space Council, and when he talks, you listen. NASA developed the Triana satellite, named after the navigator on the Santa Maria who was the first member of Columbus's expedition to spot the New World.
Originally the concept called for an extremely inexpensive satellite by NASA standards, built by students as an educational project. But eventually the decision was made to add more scientific value to the project and have the satellite built by an aerospace contractor--and the costs skyrocketed. An oversight panel noted that while the project had a giant cost overrun, the science was useful, so it still made sense to launch it as planned in 2000. But Gore was running for president, and there were complaints that if Triana was launched before the 2000 presidential election it could seem as if NASA was trying to curry favor with the new President. As a result, Congress instructed the agency not to Triana before the elections, and it was put in indefinite storage.
The space which would have been occupied by Triana was taken by FREESTAR (Fast Reaction Experiments Enabling Science, Technology, Applications and Research), a group of secondary payloads.
A giant 157 page press kit had a page of two of information on every one of the STS-107 mission's experiments along with some connection to benefits on Earth, but very little hard technical information.
Copies of the flight plan were not publicly released until after launch.
NASA did not release the very technical flight rules document until well after the accident.
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