ESSA II: Satellite Launch Marks New Departure and New Management.

At 0858 on the NASA clocks at Cape Kennedy on the morning of 28 February a Delta rocket was launched flawlessly after a clockwork countdown. The skies over central Florida were cloudy that morning, and watchers a few miles down the beach saw a fireball rise rapidly from the horizon, appear intermittently through rifts in the clouds, and then disappear before the rumble of the launch reached them. About 18 minutes after lift-off the announcement came that the ESSA II weather satellite had been successfully put into a slightly elliptical orbit more than 800 miles out. At the Cape the launch was treated as rather routine, although preparations by the project personnel and the launch crew were anything but perfunctory. It is true that the Delta launch vehicle which carried the satellite into space was number 37 in a series which has suffered only three failures, and the performance of weather satellites has been generally exemplary. But the capabilities of the new satellite made the launch worthy of special notice. The 285-pound (130-kilogram) ESSA II satellite, which is in a near-polar orbit, will ,take pictures continually over sunlit portions of the earth and transmit them almost immediately. Any ground station within range which has the relatively simple equipment needed to receive and translate the satellite's signals can produce cloudcover pictures covering a 4-millionmile area in a matter of minutes. Taken together, ESSA II and its immediate predecessor, ESSA I, which was launched in early February', make up what has been dubbed the TIROS Operational Satellite System (TOS). The name ESSA II (which derives from environmental survey satellite) echoes the acronym of the satellite's sponsoring agency, the Environmental Science Services Administration (also called ESSA) of the Department of Commerce. The TOS system is financed by ESSA, wi'th NASA acting as a contractor responsible for procure-