Craft to Fill Void in Hurricane-Spotting System : Delta Rocket Orbits Weather Satellite

A powerful Delta rocket roared skyward at twilight Thursday and boosted into orbit a $55-million weather satellite intended to fill a critical surveillance void in the coming hurricane season.

The three-stage rocket blazed aloft on schedule, briefly illuminated the sky and quickly disappeared behind a low cloud bank.

Thirty-five minutes after liftoff, National Aeronautics and Space Administration launching commentator George Diller reported that the rocket had done its job, propelling the GOES-7 satellite into an elliptical transfer orbit ranging from about 140 miles to 26,150 miles above Earth.

“We’ve got a satellite proceeding on its own, and it appears to be in good health,” Diller said. “We have had a flawless countdown and a flawless flight.”

Stationary Orbit

An on-board engine is scheduled to be fired Saturday by ground command to place the satellite in stationary orbit 22,240 miles above the Atlantic Ocean.

The successful launching continued a string of space successes that began in September, when another Delta rocket boosted a military payload into orbit. Since then, Atlas, Atlas-Centaur, Scout and Titan 3B rockets have orbited satellites.

Those flights followed a disastrous 1986 start for the U.S. space program. The space shuttle Challenger exploded on Jan. 28, killing its crew of seven; a Titan 34D exploded on April 18 and a Delta failed on May 3.

GOES-7, which stands for geostationary operational environmental satellite, is to join the already orbiting GOES-6 to form a fully operational network to keep an eye on weather patterns in a area stretching from the eastern Atlantic to the mid-Pacific.

The GOES satellites provide the familiar cloud-cover patterns seen in newspapers and on television weather reports.

Replaces Failed Satellite

GOES-7 is intended to replace GOES-5, which lost its ability to transmit cloud-cover pictures nearly three years ago, cutting by half the nation’s weather watch capability from stationary orbit.

The Delta rocket that failed in May also carried a GOES satellite that was to have replaced the disabled spacecraft. That failure was blamed on an electrical fault, which was corrected.

Normally, two fixed weather satellites are over the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, looking at the United States from east and west. But, after the failure of GOES-5, the western satellite, GOES-6, was maneuvered from the Pacific to a point south of Texas to cover all of the United States from a central location.

In that position, GOES-6 is unable to photograph storm systems in the central Pacific or survey the Atlantic off the west coast of Africa, where many hurricanes form before heading for the United States.

If GOES-7 reaches its outpost over the Atlantic, its twin will be shifted back to the Pacific.