South Korea To Give SatLaunch Another Shot

Heejin Koo at Bloomberg.net reports that South Korea will attempt to complete its first space launch today, a week after aborting the mission minutes before liftoff because a pressure gauge malfunctioned. The 140-ton Naro rocket and its satellite payload will blast off from the Naro Space Center in Goheung, South Jeolla Province. The launch risks provoking communist neighbor North Korea, which drew United Nations sanctions after firing a rocket and conducting a nuclear test this year. Kim Jong Il’s North Korean regime said August 10 it will “closely watch” proceedings to see whether the UN Security Council reacts to a South Korean space launch. South Korea is under no sanction by the Security Council, and in 2004 joined the Missile Technology Control Regime, an international agreement to prevent the proliferation of missile technology for weapons purposes.
North Korea said it sent a satellite into space on April 5, while U.S. and Russian scientists detected no vehicle in orbit, raising speculation it was a weapons test. The technology used in rockets and inter-continental ballistic missiles is similar. The UN said the launch was a “contravention” of a 2006 resolution barring the communist nation from developing missile technology. “South Korea’s satellite launch is completely different from that of North Korea,” said Yang Moo Jin, a professor at the University of North Korean Studies in Seoul. “South Korea has been completely open and frank about its space development program from the beginning. This is not the case with North Korea.” U.S. and Japanese officials have said South Korea has sufficiently explained its plans.

Last week’s cancellation by South Korea of the test was the latest one of seven delays. A programming error mistakenly showed a sudden loss of pressure and triggered a shutdown. A successful mission would make South Korea the 10th nation in the world capable of launching satellites into outer space. The Naro, developed with Russian scientists, will blast off some time in the afternoon, Seoul time. It will carry the 100- kilogram (220-pound) Science and Technology Satellite-2 to a height of 306 kilometers (190 miles) in nine minutes, Korea Aerospace Research Institute said. The probe will collect scientific data, it said. South Korea has sent 10 satellites into orbit since 1992, using rockets made and launched overseas. The Asian nation is hoping to develop a domestic satellite-carrying rocket by 2018 and send a probe to the moon’s orbit by 2020, the institute said in an e-mailed statement.