Korean Rocket to Face Moment of Truth
By Kim Tong-hyung
Staff Reporter
GOHEUNG, South Jeolla Province ― Seven years of Herculean effort and apprehension all come down to a single moment on Wednesday, somewhere between 4:40 and 6:20 p.m., when South Korea attempts its first-ever space launch from its brand new spaceport at the southern tip of the peninsula.
Should the two-stage rocket, Korea Space Launch Vehicle-1 (KSLV-1), be successfully pushed into orbit, Korea becomes the 10th country in the world to launch a spacecraft into space from its own territory. The project was an event that apparently needed no build-up, garnering rapt attention from the public as the most critical moment thus far in Korea's increasingly ambitious space program.
Officials at the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology and the Korea Aerospace Research Institute (KARI) feels uneasy with controversies erupting from a series of launch delays, technical issues and the nature of collaboration with a Russian company that is providing the technology for the KSLV-1 project.
Now, engineers and government officials at the Naro Space Center, located on an island roughly 480 kilometers southwest of Seoul, are happy to get that 140-ton chunk of metal off the ground.
Park Jeong-ju, who is responsible for developing the KSLV rocket systems at KARI, says that Aug. 19 will be the moment of truth, should weather conditions approve.
``There were some technical issues that forced several postponements _ it took longer than expected for us to complete the launching pad and the testing of the rocket's propulsion system in Russia needed more time as well. But we have been pursuing perfection in every step,'' said Park Jeong-joo, the director of KSLV systems office at KARI.
``Every category on the list will be checked and we won't fire up the rocket if the conditions aren't perfect. There could be another delay should technical problems occur or if the weather is bad, but we think we can pull it off within the launch window that is until Aug. 26.''
The mission for the 33-meter, 140-ton KSLV-1, nicknamed ``Naro'' after the location of the spaceport, is to lift a homemade satellite 306 kilometers above the surface of the Earth in a span of about 540 seconds.
Russia's Khrunichev State Research and Production Space Center was responsible for the designing and production of KSLV-1's lower stage, which contains the liquid-fueled propulsion system.
KARI built the upper stage of the rocket, which will carry a 100-kilogram satellite jointly developed by Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) and the Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology (GIST).
The launch was originally scheduled for October in 2006, but was postponed six times before the Science Ministry settled on Aug. 19 last week.
Same Bed, Different Dreams
There is an old Korean saying about two people ``sharing the same bed, having different dreams.'' This perhaps is a fitting analogy to explain the collaboration between Korea and Russia on the latest rocket project.
To the Koreans, the successful launch of KSLV-1 provides an impressive debut for the Naro Space Center and the country's formal arrival into the Asian space race.
For the Russians, the KSLV-1 launch is critical because it equals as the first, real stage test for their yet-to-be-flown ``Angara'' rocket, which has been under development since the mid-1990s and expected to make its maiden flight in 2011.
The Khrunichev Center is responsible for the development of the Angara rockets, expected to become the mainstay of the Russian unmanned rocket fleet in the future.
The KSLV-1 is designed with the same structure elements in an Angara first stage, including its rocket engine. KSLV-1 is powered by a RD-151 rocket engine, developed by Russia's NPO Energomash, which is basically a derivative of the RD-191M engine that will be used for the Angara 1.1, the first rocket of the Angara family. The RD-191 provides a thrust of 190 tons, while the RD-151 has a thrust of 170 tons, according to KARI officials.
With KSLV-1 representing the first out-of-lab test for the RD-191M engine and Angara rocket module, the Russians are undoubtedly pressured to perform.
Of course, should KSLV-1 fail, the Russians can take comfort in the fact that somebody else paid for the mess, 505.2 billion won (about $405 million) in exact, and they can still say they have yet to lose a real Angara rocket in flight.
The Koreans aren't too pleased about the KSLV-1 project being described as a glorified guinea pig, but that's an angle they can't dispute when they are paying the premium for an unproven rocket system that has never been tried before.
Controversy erupted when some KARI officials wondered to reporters whether the Khrunichev Center had fired up a RD-191 engine, not an RD-151 one, in the propulsion tests for the KSLV-1 first stage.
This has KARI President Lee Ju-jin hold a news conference, where he waved a copy of a fax sent by the Khrunichev Center and NPO Energomash, which stated that the engine tested at the labs in Moscow was a ``model analog RD-151.''
However, the paper also said that RD-151 and RD-191 were identical engines from the ``hardware's point of view,'' and that the RD-151 had been tuned to hit the flight profile of KSLV-1.
Lee failed to explain ``tuned'' exactly meant, but did say that the difference in thrust could be easily achieved by controlling turbo pressure and fuel injection.