The folks at NASA where nice enough to make us an open source project called Worldwind 
it lets you view the earth from a satelite view, and Zoom in very clode useing a 3d engine.
Be prepaired to wait, it is very hard to get onto an FTP…
I used GetRight, it will keep trying to connect… then after it sterts downloading you can tell it to do a segmented download, and search for other mirrors to speed up the download…
YOu will need about 2 gigs of freespace for this.
http://learn.arc.nasa.gov/worldwind/download.html
