North Korea failed…

And on a such a grand scale too, launching its rocket.

That…

Given that its propensity of little to no communication with the outside world, has pretty much left THIS country existing in what amounts to the Dark Ages?

Their failure comes as not so much a surprise.

[via Physorg]  (AP) — It really is rocket science and it really is hard. North Korea proved that again.

The giant explosion that gets a rocket off the ground isn’t that complicated. The superhot, superfast exhaust from that giant fire is funneled in a way that shoots the rocket upward. North Korea’s Unha-3 rocket combines two liquid propellants -hydrazine and nitric acid – that ignite when mixed, space experts say.

That’s the easy part.

Controlling that reaction and going where you want, when you want – that’s where engineers earn their money and ulcers. And it’s where past rockets and spaceships have ended in spectacular and sometimes deadly failures.

“Anybody can make something go boom. Controlling it is hard,” said former NASA associate administrator Scott Pace, director of space policy at George Washington University.

All that power has to be confined by metal and controlled by electronics. It takes the power of about a ton of TNT just to get 60 pounds into orbit at almost 18,000 mph. One tiny mistake, one mismatch in devices, one miscommunication, one bubble, and boom. [Read More]

What IS a surprise however?

The fact that this utter totalitarian nation…

Actually freaking admitted it!

[via HotAir]Rule one of totalitarian propaganda: The state is all-powerful and unerring. Resistance is utterly futile. The more captive citizens believe that, the less the regime has to worry about a revolt. Point being, this sort of admission should never, ever happen — yet here it is. How come? The Journal speculates that because the NorKs invited several dozen foreign journalists to report on the launch (which they weren’t allowed to personally witness), they felt obliged to ‘fess up publicly. But I don’t quite follow that logic. Who cares if reporters from other countries were going to go home and write it up as an epic fail? What’s important is what the locals think, and the locals will be carefully shielded from those stories.

[...]

While we’re on the subject of baffling behavior by North Korea (a big subject, I know), here’s another question to ponder: Why on earth did they build up this launch and then invite foreign reporters to witness it if they weren’t reasonably sure it’d succeed? And before you say “maybe they were reasonably sure,” read the following two posts at Danger Room arguing that not only do the NorKs not conduct missile “tests” in any meaningful sense of the term — they lack the money and the technical expertise — but they may actually be getting worse at launches. If you’re going to pop off a big missile as a show of strength to your citizen-captives and enemies abroad, you’d want to be awfully confident (a) that it’ll work and (b) that you can cover it up pretty well if it doesn’t. Their missile not only didn’t work, they didn’t even try to cover it up. This is how the new Kim “shows strength,” apparently. Bizarre.[Read More]

Not sure what is behind this attack of honesty?

But I have little doubt it will not be long-lasting.

So my plan?

Enjoy it while it lasts!

Cause I have a feeling (as the NK reports who reported this failure are being taken into concentration camps as we speak)…

It will NEVER happen again.