South Korea Launches Satellite With Its Own Rocket for the First Time (nytimes.com) 22
South Korea said it successfully launched a small but working satellite into orbit using its first homemade rocket on Tuesday, bringing the country closer to its dream of becoming a new player in the space industry and deploying its own spy satellites to better monitor North Korea. From a report: The three-stage Nuri rocket, built by the government's Korea Aerospace Research Institute together with hundreds of local companies, blasted off from the Naro Space Center in Goheung on the southwestern tip of South Korea at 4 p.m. Tuesday. Seventy minutes after the liftoff, South Korea announced that Nuri had succeeded in its mission of thrusting a 357-pound working satellite, as well as a 1.3-ton dummy satellite, into orbit 435 miles above the Earth.
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A much cheaper system could do that.
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Much like the Space Race of the 1960's. There was no real military advantage from it, but it was just a perceived advantage. The cost and risks of having Satellites in orbit with armed warheads, compared to high altitude aircraft, or long range missiles, never really was a real advantage. While it seems cool in Sci-Fi, in reality it is just a lot of expense that can be used in other ways that will offer more benefit.
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To be fair, ICBMs are "useful" threats if you are on the other side of the planet. I'm speaking specifically of the problem mentioned, where the total distance is 160km by roadway.
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Ya know, I've had a thought for a while which is, someone figures out how to capture a small asteroid. They drag/push it back into Earth orbit, then tell their enemy they'll drop the thing on that country unless certain demands are met.
To go a step further, rather than one large rock, have multiple ones. Think of an asteroid MRV. A slight nudge and gravity does all th
Re: Can it reach Pyongyang? (Score:3)
Nothing is to stop you. This is the subject of many sci fi novels, most popularly The Expanse.
Personally, I see it as more viable to build a particle accelerator in space that can accelerate relatively large (meaning a grain of sand ish sized) to some fraction of c. Seems like a much more effective weapon since the energy needed can be provided via solar panels, and the person being attacked isnâ(TM)t going to see the shot coming for a few months or years. The biggest issue I see is keeping your sup
Re: Can it reach Pyongyang? (Score:2)
That's not completely true. Satellites could launch from a position which has less visibility. When missiles are launched, we know about every aspect within a few minutes. Where it was launched, what the trajectory is and likely some sense of payload. More so the best period to intercept something like an ICBM is during this first leg of its journey before it has achieved altitude. Though at the time of the cold war, intercepting a missile was still more science fiction but now there is perhaps a statistica
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The real advantage was espionage: imaging and signals intelligence were major drivers for the space race.
The US president at the time wanted the Russians to be first to orbit, to set a precedent that satellites would be allowed to overfly enemy territory.
And orbital launches served as a demonstration that the host country had achieved the capability to launch an ICBM to anywhere on Earth. Sputnik 1 was launched on the R-7 ICBM. The R-7 had to be really big for an ICBM because the Soviets hadn't mastered sma
Dummy satellite? (Score:2)
I'm curious as to the orbital decay of that dummy satellite. Otherwise it sounds like more hazardous space junk? And an expensive add on to the flight.
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They are trying to test launch capabilities, and ability to successfully fling something heavy into orbit is part of the test.
Spending tens of millions building a 1.3 ton *real* sat when you are not confident in success now that would be a waste.
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South Korea wins the rocket race... (Score:3)
...against North Korea for the first Inter Continental Ballistic Missile.
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...and Blue Origin too!
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^ this guys gets it. I suppose their concern is invasion by China. DPRK is too close.
Homage rocket? (Score:1)
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Congratulations! (Score:1)
Nuri (Score:3)
This is the second flight of the rocket after the third stage failed during a test flight last fall resulting in the payload not reaching orbit.
Its nominal payload capacity is 2600 kg. For comparison, the Falcon 1's payload to the same altitude was roughly 600 kg. (Altitude matters and there's no standard for specifying capacity to LEO, so that's an approximation.)
Looks like South Korea has a winner, and a bona fide space program, making them roughly the 11th country to do so, depending on how you count it. I'm inclined to credit them with being the 10th, since that doesn't count ESA (which isn't a country but should count), and does count Iran and North Korea, both of whom used Soviet-era Russian designs and so shouldn't count. (And in fact Iran used North Korea's variant of that Russian design.)(And Iran's capability is completely defunct after an explosion on the pad in 2019, which has never been restored.) New Zealand's Rocket Lab launches aren't counted because Rocket Lab New Zealand is a wholly owned subsidiary of an American company.
In order of independent achievement of orbit:
It's a pretty short list nearly a quarter of the way through the 21st century.
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Rocket Lab achieved space with its sounding rocket Atea in 2009, 4 years before it became a US company (which it did for the US government contracts and funding purposes).