Posted on 04/05/2009 8:57:55 AM PDT by kellynla
SEOUL South Korea and Japan scrambled to interpret the fallout from a North Korean rocket launch Sunday that the regime said placed a satellite into orbit a claim contradicted by both Washington and Seoul.
National security officials met in separate meetings in Tokyo and Seoul, where anti-Pyongyang demonstrators clashed with police for the second time in three days this time burning a missile replica and a photograph of North Korean leader Kim Jong Il.
Within hours after the three-stage rocket lifted off from North Korea's Musudan-ri launch facility at 11:20 a.m., the state-run North Korean press agency trumpeted the success of the satellite called Kwangmyongsong-2.
"The carrier rocket and the satellite developed by our own wisdom and technology are the fruit of our struggle to enhance our nation's space science technology to a higher level," said the Korean Central News Agency.
Yet South Korean government officials said late today that Pyongyang's satellite was a failure.
"So far, what [we] concluded is that the first to the third [stages] fell on the sea," Lee Sang-hee, South Korea's defense minister, told an emergency session of parliament. "[We] judge that the object failed to enter orbit."
Earlier, South Korean Foreign Minister Yu Myung-hwan said he had conducted phone discussions with his counterparts in the U.S., China and Japan about the satellite, adding that "additional assessment is needed to conclude whether it was a success or not."
The U.S. Northern Command in Colorado said on website that all the rocket's stages as well as its payload fell into the ocean. "No object entered orbit and no debris fell on Japan," the site said.
(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...
Might as well put more stock in what North Korea is saying than our own government.
And if it had been a success? What country would have been hit and how much time would any country in its sites have to respond or protect itself? It should have been brought down the instant it left NKorea air space. But......it takes a President with guts to do that. I guess the tens of thousands of dollars spent to send out Navy ships to sea, was worth it?
Yup, another dismal failure for his regime and Iran.
luckily none of the rocket parts hit land ..
Kwangmyongsong-2 kinda reminds me of our Vanguard. Wait until they send up Kwangmylongdong-3.
It was halfway to Hawaii I hear. I’m sure we had a way or two ready to reach out and touch the pea in the sky.
LIl Kimmie’s just pee’d off he can’t go to Waikiki and hang with the babes and the Japanese can.
I know that this is deep water ... for everyone else in the world.
“It should have been brought down the instant it left NKorea air space. But......it takes a President with guts to do that.”
EXACTLY!
Meanwhile, half their population is starving to death. Pure evil.
And if they did, our fawning media would never tell us. Reference the Russian "satellite" that entered US airspace off of the east coast.
“Our” government has to say something so that they do not appear as weak and spineless as they (in reality) happen to be.
President Obama's Failure to Deal with North Korea is the ONLY Failure of Rocket Launch."
If at first you don’t succeed... You take your rockets and go home?
I don’t think so... They did pretty darn good for a first shot. Next year they’ll show us they can reach D.C.
Maybe a failure.. how far did it travel? The distance from Iran to Israel? It may not have reached orbit, was it really their intention to do so or just show that it can work to deliver a payload a certain distance?
This launch was nothing more than a sales presentation for terrorist states that are in the market to reach out beyond their borders. In that case it was a success.
Here’s a newsguy mapping out it’s course.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/2222692/posts
In other words, it was a very successful ballistic missile test.
But as has been proposed before, was there a satellite, or was the launching of a satellite a ruse, and the true objective was to test their missile?
If the latter, then it’s more than likely the launch was successful for their purpose.
Perhaps we should watch the reaction in Iran for a clue.
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