North Korean space officials are hard at work on a five-year plan to put more advanced satellites into orbit by 2020, and do not intend to stop there: They are also aiming for the moon and beyond.
In a media interview, a senior official at the North’s version of NASA said international sanctions will not stop Pyongyang from launching more satellites by 2020 and he hopes to see the North Korean flag on the moon within the next 10 years.
“Even though the US and its allies try to block our space development, our aerospace scientists will conquer space and definitely plant the flag of the DPRK [Democratic People’s Republic of Korea] on the moon,” North Korean National Aerospace Development Administration scientific research department director Hyon Kwang-il said.
Illustration: Yusha
An unmanned, no-frills North Korean moon mission in the not-too-distant future is not as far-fetched as it might seem. Outside experts say it is ambitious, but conceivable. While the US is the only country to have conducted manned lunar missions, other nations have sent unmanned spacecraft there and have in that sense planted their flags.
“It would be a significant increase in technology, not one that is beyond them, but you have to debug each bit,” Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who maintains an exhaustive blog on international satellites and satellite launches, said in an e-mail.
Hyon said the current five-year plan, at the order of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, focuses on launching more earth observation satellites and what would be its first geostationary communications satellite — which, technologically, would be a major step forward.
He said universities are also expanding programs to train rocket scientists.
“We are planning to develop the earth observation satellites and to solve communications problems by developing geostationary satellites. All of this work will be the basis for the flight to the moon,” Hyon said on July 28, adding that he would like to see that happen “within 10 years’ time.”
North Korea has marked a number of successes in its space program — and, of course, in its development of ever-more-sophisticated long-range missiles for military use. On Wednesday last week, it test-fired what was believed to be a medium-range ballistic missile into the seas off Japan, the fourth reported weapons launch the North has carried out in about two weeks.
It launched its latest satellite — the Kwangmyongsong 4, or Brilliant Star 4 — into orbit on Feb. 7, just one month after conducting what it claims was its first H-bomb test.
That brought a new raft of sanctions because nuclear tests and rocket launches, which can have military applications, are banned under UN resolutions.
Hyon said the sanctions are “ridiculous.”
“Our country has started to accomplish our plan and we have started to gain a lot of successes,” he said. “No matter what anyone thinks, our country will launch more satellites.”
He said Pyongyang’s long-term target is to use its satellites to provide data for crop and forestry assessments and improved communications.
The North also intends “to do manned spaceflight and scientific experiments in space, make a flight to the moon and moon exploration, and also exploration to other planets,” he said.
The US made its first lunar flyby in 1959, only six months after its first satellite, Explorer 1, though it took eight more years and several failed attempts to succeed with a lunar orbiter. The USSR made its first moon shot after only three successful Sputnik satellites. Their probe — just a year and a half after Sputnik 1 — reached the moon, but missed its orbit.
“So it’s not ridiculous to attempt a moon mission early in your space program,” McDowell said.
“Given their low flight rate of one mission every few years, I think it is hard to see them succeeding in this in the next five years, but possible to see them attempting it,” he said.
North Korea has two satellites in orbit, KMS-3-2 and KMS-4. It put its first satellite in orbit in 2012, a feat few other countries have ever achieved. South Korea, for example, has yet to do so.
Hyon said that as of July 27, KMS-4 had completed 2,513 orbits and that within one day after its launch, it transmitted 700 photographic images back to earth.
He said it is still working properly and sending data whenever it passes over North Korea, which is four times a day.
Foreign experts have yet to confirm any communications from the satellite.
“There’s been no independent evidence that KMS-4 sent data back, but no evidence that it didn’t, either,” McDowell said.
German analyst Markus Schiller, one of the world’s foremost experts on North Korea’s missiles and rockets, said a geostationary satellite might be a more ambitious goal for Pyongyang than a lunar flyby or crash-landing.
“Hitting the moon hard would require less performance — power, rocket size — than getting into GEO [geostationary equatorial orbit], but it will still be quite a challenge,” he said in an e-mail from Munich, where he is based.
“Judging from what I have seen so far with their space program, it will take North Korea about a decade or more to get to lunar orbit at best — if they really pursue this mission,” Schiller said. “My personal guess, however, is that they might try, but they will fail, and we will not see a successful North Korea lunar orbiter for at least two decades, if ever.”
Hyon said claims that North Korea’s space plan is a military program in disguise are hypocritical, considering the history of space exploration. The US, Russia and China all built their space programs out of military technology. Many of the rockets they use today were initially developed as intercontinental ballistic missiles.
“It is the US that militarized space,” he said.
He said the North Korean military has already succeeded in developing long-range missiles that can reach anywhere on Earth, “especially to American territory” and so “there is no need for our state to use the space program for ballistic missile development.”
That argument is not likely to sway sanctions advocates in Washington or Seoul.
However, Schiller said the claim is plausible, given the advances in weaponry North Korea has displayed through its overtly military missile tests and the specific designs of the Unha rockets that are used to launch its satellites.
“I agree they [the military] will not learn any essential new things from launching another Unha rocket,” he said. “Of course, there are lessons learned that you can also apply for the missile program, but the whole missile program shows so many different characteristics that they seem to be separated to a certain degree.”
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