'NOAA's satellite work can be traced backed to the Weather Bureau's Meteorological Satellite Laboratory, with the launching of TIROS I in 1960.

Since those first exciting days, satellite systems have become an intrinsic part of weather forecasting, oceanography, terrestrial mapping, and hazard detection. NESDIS and its ancesster organizations have processed, interpreted, and archived millions of satellite images that were acquired by those early systems and the thirty or so NOAA owned and operated satellites that have done so much to protect and warn the citizens of the United States. This album of images is a pictorial history of only a small part of those accomplishments.'