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South Korea's First Rocket Fails To Reach Set Orbit
Matt_dk writes "The first satellite launched by South Korea failed to reach its designated orbit pattern on Tuesday, the NY Times is reporting. The two-staged KSLV-1 rocket, built in cooperation with Russia, failed to deliver the 100-kilogram oceanic and atmospheric research satellite into its target orbit. The rocket was launched from the Naro Space Center, 300 miles south of the capital Seoul. 'The failure to push the satellite into its intended orbit was announced by Ahn Myong-man, the minister of education, science and technology, at a news conference. Mr. Ahn gave no further details. But South Korean news outlets, citing unidentified sources, said the satellite broke away from the rocket about 22 miles farther from the Earth than had been intended.'"
Or the "citizens" of North Korea who are brainwashed into believing (or supporting) every word he says.
Give the citizens of North Korea some credit, it isn't really being brainwashed if there's a very real chance of you being sentenced to a few decades hard labor for saying the slightest negative thing about the government.
Ostensibly a failure for the South Koreans, since some kind of failure of staging caused the satellite to be inserted into the incorrect orbit. And in all likelihood, the perigee ended up being too low, causing the payload to be inserted into the ocean...
The first stage is basically Russian hardware (Khrunichev), and is basically a flight test of the Angara common booster core with an advanced Russian LOX-kerosene RD-191 engine. Since the failure occurred *AFTER* staging, the failure most likely occurred in South Korean hardware.
So if I were the South Koreans, I'd be fairly pissed right now. Although this is only a first attempt; anything space-related is bloody hard, and you've got to expect failures on brand new, untested hardware.
On the other hand, if I were one of the Russian engineers responsible for the first stage, I'd be pretty pleased with the successful Angara flight test.
(Although I'm not sure if I was the only one who saw the launch video, and saw the first stage pitch suddenly before clearing the tower and then pitch in the opposite direction. Didn't look good...)
But someone who isn't familiar with Korean geography gains nothing from this description. They might have well said, "It's in the same country as Seoul." given the relative locations of the two points of interest. In fact that might have been less likely to lead someone to the wrong conclusions, given that calling out Seoul implies that it's the nearest point of interest.
I might have said, "On the South West coast of South Korea." instead.
In fact, I just realized that Nagasaki, Japan, which I think is reasonably well known in the US, is closer to the Naro Space Center than Seoul is!
-Peter