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North Korea’s Latest Missile Test Sets Off Alarm Bells
North Korea tested a missile early Sunday, local time. But unlike so many that have failed shortly after launch or fell harmlessly into the Sea of Japan, this launch is raising alarm bells. Many experts fear the weapon could have a much longer range than other NoKo missiles.
According to reports out of Japan, today’s missile traveled 700 km (430 miles), which isn’t terribly troubling. But it flew for about 30 minutes — a much longer time than would be required using a standard trajectory. Japan also claimed that North Korea fired the missile to a height of 2000 km (1,240 miles), represented by the black line in the graph above.
This means if the missile was fired with a standard trajectory, it would reach a range of 4,500 km (2,800 miles), shown with a red line. That’s a game changer, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists, which created the graph.
Published in Foreign Policy, MilitaryThis range is considerably longer than the estimated range of the Musudan missile, which showed a range of about 3,000 km in a test last year. Guam is 3,400 km from North Korea. Reaching the US West Coast would require a missile with a range of more than 8,000 km. Hawaii is roughly 7,000 km from North Korea.
This missile may have been the new mobile missile seen in North Korea’s April 15 parade. It appears to be a two-stage liquid-fueled missile.
Actually I had that in mind.
That is precisely what ballistic missiles are designed to do.
Jon,
Thank you for the chart. Without it I’d never have known. It won’t be long till the ICBM.
Better think about it now.
Regards,
Jim
Thanks John, there’s a reason we keep you around.
Yes, but if they where really sneaky about it, the ship would never have visited NK, they would have smuggled the container – into another port city – maybe somewhere in China (for example) and use a ship with a convenient flag, a Ukrainian crew and maybe Japanese ownership.
Missiles have been on the rails since the 1970’s or 80’s – the USSR had mobile launchers on rail cars – even way back then. And as I explained in the above post you move the launcher/missile/warhead to the ship in a busy 3rd countries port – where its mounted on a ship that has no connection to NK, it could be nearly impossible to detect by observation.
anonymous, the reported altitude of 2,000 km seems fishy to me. Did that seem off to you? Like 2,000 km up? Seems a little too high, doesn’t it?
Wondering that myself. How did it not end up in orbit? That’s approaching 20 times the minimum for low Earth orbit.
It’s not a practical trajectory for a missile as it would be used in combat. However, for test flights it’s often more important to get the proper time of flight than the proper range. It’s hard for a country like North Korea, lacking a blue water navy, to gather telemetry from a missile test flight over a 4,000 km ground range, so they launch it on a short range, high loft trajectory to prove out the missile subsystems while remaining in line-of-sight of their telemetry ground stations.
As for the question of orbit, it’s all about speed. An object at high altitude will simply fall back down unless it has a very large horizontal velocity. Ballistic missiles, by definition, do not reach a fast enough speed to achieve orbit. See here.
You can keep climbing as long as you produce enough thrust to over come inertia, but unless you also accelerate to orbital or escape velocities your vessel will fall back to earth as soon as you stop the engines. Its not your altitude that determines if you’re in orbit – but rather your velocity.
I am with the doubters here. The International Space Station is only 250 miles up. This flew EIGHT times higher? Did they watch it go by? I think somebody is confused. (And it may be me.)
Since this is from the Union of Concerned Scientists and not the government of North Korea, I think its safe to assume its roughly correct – from independent observations.
You’re correct that Space Station is only 250 miles up, its orbit is inclined to 51.64 degrees to the equator, its location is not secret, there is even a website that shows its exact location on a globe. North Korea would be very careful not to damage the station with a missile test, and they also wouldn’t want it’s scientific observation instruments to record the test, so if you where to check – I would bet the ISS was far far away from this missiles trajectory.
It is not that hard. It takes a change in velocity of of about 13000 feet per second to reach an altitude of 1000 miles above the surface. This neglects a whole bunch of stuff, so let’s add another 1000 ft/sec for losses: total DeltaV = 14,000 ft/sec. To get into orbit at space station altitudes takes a Delta-V of about 25,500 ft/sec.
Why the difference? What goes up must come down. In order to put yourself into orbit you must be moving horizontally fast enough that you remain the same height above the earth. At ISS altitudes that is about five miles per second. So you need not only enough acceleration to reach ISS altitudes, you need to add a whole bunch more to “turn” 90 degrees from straight up so you are moving five miles per second parallel to the Earth’s surface.
It is possible, but unlikely. It would depend upon where the ISS was at the time of the launch. Assume the NoKo rocket could be seen 1000 miles away. (That is probably generous.) There is less about a 3% chance the ISS will be within sight of the rocket when it is launched (ie – within 1000 miles). That it would come near enough to hit ISS? Laughably small. If you tried to shoot the ISS down with a ballistic missile you would almost certainly miss. You might have a chance if there was terminal guidance, but not without it.
Seawriter
Beat me to it.
Seawriter
From a What if? xkcd that covers orbital speed:
Thank you all. I am no longer with the doubters.
Of course, maybe I tend to switch sides too easily.
Perhaps that explains my vote for Donald Trump.
Another advantage of flying straight up, (I think this was pointed out earlier) is that North Korea has no down range data collection capability – once the rocket is over the horizon they’ll never hear from it again. So when the fly up, they can do the entire flight within line of sight of the launch site.
For you gamers, I highly recommend Kerbal Space Program. The game requires you to master a lot of concepts that just didn’t make sense to my little brain. For instance, once I thought of orbiting as really just falling and missing the Earth, things started to come together.