Interesting that they launched on the anniversary of the Gagarin and first Shuttle flight. The joke tweets have started already. “Man, North Korean rockets break up faster than a Kardashian marriage.” “It didn’t crash into the sea — it was a successful attack on Aquaman.”
I’ll bet Hilary Rosen is happy that Twitter has found a new distraction. Except for the combined tweets: “That rocket had the same trajectory as Hilary Rosen’s PR career.
I wonder if Jeff Bezos would be interested in retrieving this one, too…? 🙂
Jeff Bezos – the next nuclear power!
Tomorrow North Korea will proudly announce the successful test of their new anti-submarine missile.
Too bad it didn’t fall on the Democratic Peoples Palace and kill JUST the Democratic People’s Tormentor!
At least the North Korean rocket actually took off and had it’s epic fail and final descent to oblivion in relative obscurity. No one will remember it tomorrow.
Suddenly this post is super adequate again:
http://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=28357.msg873493#msg873493
“North Korean satellite sleeps with the fishes.”
Prophetic.
Since it worked out so well last time.
DPRK Rocket Program; stick a nork in it.
We have a winner!
Earth’s newest weather satellite showing catastrophic rise in sea levels.
======+======
*\____/\__
~~——\_|_|_D
ROFLCOPTERS, safe from NORK missles since 6,000 BC and counting…
You’ve discovered their secret! Al Gore was the payload.
So is there any word what went wrong? I saw an animation at Discovery News that suggests a structural failure at MaxQ, or perhaps a first stage separation problem?
They were going for OSO (Ocean Synchronous Orbit).
It was a units mixup again–someone substituted fathoms for meters.
If i were to speculate on the failure, i would guess that the guy pedalling the oxidiser pump wasn’t fast enough, or the other guy pulling the separation cord got too excited and pulled early.
Tee hee hee! Got a real chuckle out of that one. I’ll put that one up there with Curt Thomson’s “DPRK Rocket Program; stick a nork in it.”
Yeah, but running fuel-rich really isn’t an issue.
What happened is that callout went over the radio, “Hortator, we are go for throttle up!” resulting in the guy beating the drums to increase his cadence.
It must have been one of the guys working one of the fuel pump handles who then collapsed from exhaustion, leading to oxidizer-rich combustion and then burn through.
North Korea’s state news is blaming the failure on global warming: “100 mile high rogue wave detected just after launch.”
What if it wasn’t a failure? What if they tested the systems they wanted to test successfully, then blew it up to keep the international community off their backs?
One scary thought is that their current success rate roughly matches SpaceX at the same point with the Falcon 1 development.
Except they’re getting worse, not better. On the first Falcon 1 flight, failure happened less than a minute into flight. The second flight failed after the second stage started coning at near orbital velocity. The third flight failed due to a residual thrust issue at staging. The next flight was completely successful.
The North Korean’s first flight was the most successful and the last two attempts are getting progressively worse.
That’s what happens when you torture or execute your scientists when they fail to deliver on such a grand scale. The people left are inevitably second-stringers.
Not that I’m certain the DPRK does this, but if they’re willing to put their international athletes in the gulag for not winning games, it’s not a stretch to think that extends to other matters of international embarrassment, too.