Korea, Russia Agree on Fresh Rocket Launch Attempt

Seoul and Moscow agreed to attempt another launch of the Korean-made space rocket, probably no later than September next year. Two previous launches of the rocket, dubbed Naro, in August 2009 and June last year failed.

A joint review board met in Seoul on Tuesday and Wednesday to find out what caused the failure of the second launch, the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology said on Thursday.

"The two countries did not agree on the cause of failure but agreed to fix all the problems each side pinpointed," said ministry official Choi Jong-bae.

The Korea Aerospace Research Institute and Russia's Khrunichev State Research and Production Space Center, the two contracting parties in the development of the rocket, will now come up with detailed improvement plans for the third launch.

The Naro is composed of a Russian-made first-stage booster and a second-stage rocket made in Korea. Korea argued that the second launch failed because the connector between the first and second-stage rockets was damaged due to malfunction of the first-stage booster and this caused partial damage to the fuel/oxidizer delivery system.

But Russia attributes the failure to the malfunctioning of the flight termination system, a kind of emergency blast system developed by Korea.