SEOUL, South Korea — South Korea on Wednesday succeeded in thrusting a satellite into orbit for the first time, achieving its ambition of joining an elite club of space technology leaders, seven weeks after the successful launching of a satellite by rival North Korea.
South Korea has attached an intense national pride to the 140-ton, 108-feet tall Korea Space Launch Vehicle-1, or KSLV-1, which was built with the help of Russian technology. Feeling besieged by China and Japan, both of which have successful space programs, South Korea has sought a technological prowess of its own.
That task has gained more urgency after North Korean successfully placed a rocket into orbit on Dec. 12. Only a handful of countries have succeeded in independently launching satellites into orbit, with Iran also recently joining the club. After studying the debris of the North Korean rocket that splashed into South Korean waters, officials here determined that North Korea, despite its backward economy, has locally built key components of its rocket.
With all major South Korean television stations airing a live broadcast of the countdown, the two-stage rocket blasted off from the newly built Naro Space Center in Goheung, 200 miles south of Seoul.
"After analyzing the data, we determined that our satellite entered its intended orbit," said Lee Ju-ho, the government’s minister of education, science and technology, during a nationally televised news conference. "Today, we took a leap toward becoming a power in space technology. This is a success for all the people."
Although part of the two-stage rocket was built by the Russians, South Korea considered the successful launching on Wednesday an important toehold in the space technology, the latest high-tech market where the country has decided to become a player. By 2021, it says, it will launch a completely indigenous three-stage, liquid-fueled rocket capable of carrying a 1.5-ton payload into orbit.
KSLV-1 was the first space rocket to take off from South Korea. The country purchased its liquid-fueled first booster stage from the Russian company Khrunichev in a deal that included a transfer of technology to South Korean engineers. South Korea has built the rocket’s solid-fueled second stage that carried a small, 100-kilogram "Naro" Science and Technology Satellite-2C, built by the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology.
The satellite, which has a one-year operational lifespan, will mainly collect data on space radiation. Officials said they needed until early Thursday to conclude whether the satellite was functioning properly.
Before Naro, the country had five satellites in orbit, but all of them were launched abroad foreign rockets.
The two Koreas, which remain technically at war after their 1950-53 Korean War ended in a truce, have recently taken their rivalry into a rocket race. They both have suffered spectacular failures before a successful launching. South Korea had previously fired the KSLV-1 rocket twice from Goheung, first in 2009 and again in 2010, but each time, the rocket failed to put a satellite into orbit. The third attempt, initially scheduled for October, has been twice delayed at the last minute because of technical glitches.
The government of President Lee Myung-bak eagerly awaited the rocket’s successful launching before he ended his five-year term on Feb. 25. But the success came at a sensitive time on the Korean Peninsula.
The United Nations Security Council adopted a resolution last week tightening sanctions against North Korea as punishment for its December rocket launching. The council considered the North Korean launching a cover for testing intercontinental ballistic missile technology and a violation of its earlier resolutions that banned the country from conducting such tests.
North Korea has vehemently rejected the U.N. resolution, vowing to launch more long-range rockets and conduct a third nuclear test. It accused the Security Council and Washington, which led international support for its resolution, of applying "double standards," noting that countries like South Korea were free to launch rockets.
South Korea said that its program, unlike North Korea’s, was solely for commercial purposes.
North Korea’s three-stage Unha-3 rocket put a small refrigerator-size satellite into orbit in December. Though South Korean officials doubted that the North Korean satellite was functioning properly, they said that the successful launching demonstrated that North Korea was acquiring the technology for an intercontinental ballistic missile that can fly more than 6,200 miles.
For years, South Korea’s space ambitions have languished under the constraints of agreements with the United States, which feared that a robust rocket program might be transferred to the building of missiles and help accelerate a regional arms race.
South Korea has spent $500 million on its rocket project. It’s a paltry sum compared to the billions of dollars in space development projects by such regional leaders as China, Japan and India.
Still, like North Korea, South Korea has bestowed its rocket program with a halo of national pride.
"Students and youths! The Republic of Korea is expanding around the world and toward space!" Mr. Lee, the science minister, said during the news conference, using the official name of South Korea.
