Thursday, August 20, 2009

South Korea cancels satellite launch

The Korean Aerospace Research Institute's KSLV-1, on its launching pad after the scheduled launch was suspended on Wednesday. (Getty Images)

Mark McDonald
New York Times

South Korea canceled the first satellite launching from its own territory on Wednesday only seven minutes before the planned liftoff, attributing the decision to a technical problem.

The terminated mission seemed to avert, for the moment, a new flare-up of tensions with North Korea, which has been condemned internationally for launching its own rockets and has said the United Nations should apply the same punitive standards to the South. South Korea’s aerospace officials told reporters at the Naro Space Center that they had canceled the launching because of a glitch in the in the automatic launching sequence, perhaps as a result of a faulty high-pressure tank. It was unclear why the problem was discovered with only a few minutes before the final countdown.

Read the article HERE.

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