S. Korea, Russia move to find cause of failed rocket launch

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SEOUL, June 9 (Yonhap) -- South Korea and Russia plan to set up a joint investigation panel to determine the exact cause of the botched launch of a space rocket last year, the government said Thursday.
The Naro-1 rocket, jointly built by the two countries, was lost shortly after takeoff from a space center on South Korea's south coast in June last year. The two sides have so far made little progress in pinpointing the cause.
South Korea's Ministry of Education, Science and Technology said the independent panel will be composed of 30 engineers and scientists from the two countries and will likely hold its first meeting before the end of July.
No government officials or representatives from the state-run Korea Aerospace Research Institute (KARI) or Russia's Khrunichev State Research and Production Space Center will sit on the new panel, although Seoul and Moscow pledged full support for the investigation process, the ministry said.
"Experts who were not involved in the building of the Naro-1 and its launch are expected to help the two countries overcome the current deadlock of trying to determine what went wrong," a ministry official said.
In the past, four rounds of official meetings by the Failure Review Board made little headway as experts from KARI and Khrunichev disagreed on the cause.
"Because these experts (on the new joint investigation panel) can see things objectively, progress may be made to discover the problem so it can be fixed," said the official, who declined to be identified. "No deadlines have been set for the new panel to reach a verdict since they have to check all the available data."
He added that regardless of which side is most at fault, Russia has already agreed to provide another first-stage rocket without extra costs, with the blastoff expected for 2012. South Korea has spent over 500 billion won (US$465 million) since 2002 on the Naro-1, also known as the Korea Space Launch Vehicle-1 project.
Because Seoul had no experience in building and launching space rockets, it received extensive support from Russia.
Meanwhile, a local team of 17 rocket experts, who have been trying to discover the reason behind Naro-1's loss, said they have come up with three likely causes for the launch failure.
Based on telemetry data, video images and other vital information, the two-stage, 140-ton Naro-1 rocket experienced a "shock" 136.3 seconds after blastoff, followed by an internal explosion one second later, which caused all contact to be lost, the team said.
There is a chance that the flight termination system in the second solid-fuel rocket was activated by mistake, or a malfunction in the oxidation and compression systems in the first-stage rocket may have brought down the Naro-1, the team said.
It also said that problems with rocket separation explosives between the first and second stages could have resulted in the rocket's loss.
"At present, no conclusion has been reached since it is hard to test all the hypotheses in laboratory simulations alone," the ministry said.
The failed launch came on the heals of the first Naro-1 blastoff in August 2009. In the first launch, a problem with the assembly of the second-stage rocket made it impossible to deploy a satellite in proper orbit.
yonngong@yna.co.kr