“It’s just old age,” said Milton Mortman, a shift supervisor at the satellite operations control center, as one of the nation’s two storm-tracking weather satellites blinked out over the

Western Pacific. The Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite, GOES-6, which had been near the end of its expected life span, provided the popular moving cloud pictures for

television weather forecasts. The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration satellite was launched in April of 1983. A sister satellite will be moved over from the Eastern

Atlantic to do double duty. Three new GOES satellites are scheduled for launch, with the first one going aloft in July 1990. Until then, forecasters will have only one operational GOES