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South Korea’s Army announced today that North Korea had launched an “unidentified projectile,” hours after Pyongyang notified Japan of its preparations to launch a new spy satellite.
“North Korea fired an unidentified projectile southward over the Yellow Sea,” South Korea’s armed forces general staff said after Seoul, Beijing and Tokyo concluded their first trilateral summit since 2019. According to Seoul, “many projectile fragments” were found in the sea after Pyongyang opened fire.
South Korea’s General Staff said in a statement that the trajectory of the projectile launched from the Dongchang-ri area of the West Sea Space Launch Base in northwestern South Korea was first detected at 22:44 local time. Located – facing the West Sea (the name of the Yellow Sea in both South and North Korea).
“The projectile was detected as a large mass of debris on the surface of North Korean waters at around 22:46 (14:46 in Lisbon), and the authorities of the Republic of Korea (South Korea’s official name) and the United States will conduct a detailed analysis to determine whether the flight was normal,” the text added.
Given that the trajectory of the first detected projectile differed by only two minutes from the second detected in the form of fragments, it is believed that it exploded shortly after takeoff, and North Korea thus added another failure to its space program after two failed Chollima-1 rocket launches in the spring and summer of 2023.
In November, Pyongyang finally succeeded in launching a rocket and sending its first spy satellite, Malligyong-1, into orbit.
Japanese government spokesman Yoshimasa Hayashi told a news conference that the projectile “disappeared” [do radar)] “Therefore, we believe it did not reach Earth orbit,” he added.
Japan’s population warning system was initially activated in Okinawa (in the southwest of the country) after the projectile was detected and calculated, but was deactivated minutes later because it “never flew over the designated area,” a government source told Kyodo News.
In turn, Japan’s NHK television broadcast images apparently taken from the China-North Korea border (the Sohae base is located about 50 kilometers south of the Chinese city of Dandong) showing first an irregular pattern of burning in the night sky, and then what appeared to be an explosion.
Pyongyang notified the Japanese Coast Guard today that there will be a launch window between today, Monday, and June 3 to put a new spy satellite into orbit. North Korea said earlier this year it would launch three more “Malligyong” spy satellites by 2024.
Russian help, considered crucial to the success of the November launch, was greatly enhanced following the September 2023 summit between North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
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