To hear McCain talk, this sounds like a tremendous waste of money like Palin's Bridge to Nowhere. Unfortunately, while she changed her mind about the bridge and scrapped the project once it became a political hot potato, she had little enough sense that she still built the Road to Nowhere that would have connected the bridge to the mainland, even after the bridge project was scrapped. She spent more to build that useless road than it would have cost to renovate every auditorium in every planetarium in the country. The "$3 million projector" really isn't that kind of a stupid boondoggle, though. The truth is that the $3 million was for the renovation of the Adler Planetarium Auditorium, a 78 year old facility whose equipment is 40 years old, and the companies that made it no longer make spare parts. Over 10 million students have used the auditorium, and it has had 30 million visitors. But the benefits it bestows to the local economy and its use as part of the Illinois educational system aren't the reason why those of us who don't live in Illinois should think of it as an investment instead of a boondoggle. The fact is that it is a part of the entire nation's educational system. Adler provides teaching materials and interactive displays that are used in astronomy classes throughout the country, not just in Illinois. The renovation of the auditorium would help teachers and students alike. It's one thing to criticize something that really is useless, like that road to nowhere. It's another to criticize something that your own child is going to need in order to learn about science and astronomy. The same people who complain that our children are falling behind the rest of the world in their science education are now saying that spending a pittance in relation to the total budget in order to improve the quality of their education is a waste of money???
http://www.adlerplanetarium.org/education/distancelearning/index.shtml
Secondly, the "overhead projector" that is part of the renovation isn't even close to the item that McCain described.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeiss_projector
Also, even though all of the members of Congress from Illinois supported the renovation of the Adler Planetarium auditorium, including several Republicans, the earmark didn't survive long enough to come to a vote. There just wasn't enough money; the 12,000 million per week for the Iraq war was much more important than spending 3 million for something that would be used for our children's education for the next 40 years.