South Korea Successfully Performs a Rocket Engine Test Launch
Today, South Korea successfully performed a rocket engine test launch, according to officials. This paves the way for the development of Korea’s’ own space launch vehicle.
Video footage portrayed the single-stage rocket, propelled by a liquid fuel engine, lift off from the Naro Space Center on the southern coast and fly into the sky, trailing yellow and blue flames.
Vice Science Minister Lee Jin-gyu told journalists that the test vehicle was successfully launched and flight data that was collected showed the engine was functioning properly.
According to the Korea Aerospace Research Institute (KARI), the rocket has a mass of 52 tonnes and measures 25.8 metres (84.6 feet) long. It was equipped with a single engine capable of 75-tonne thrust.
The engine was developed and built as part of a $1.8 billion project. It will be used to propel the country’s first indigenous three-stage launch vehicle, the Korea Space Launch Vehicle-2 (KSLV-2).
Engine combustion lasted for 151 seconds, exceeding an initial goal of 140 seconds. This brought the rocket to an altitude of 75 kilometres (46 miles) before the engine stopped.
However, it continued flying due to inertia, reaching a suborbital altitude of 209 kilometres, 319 seconds after lift-off.
Then it splashed down into the ocean 429 kilometres southeast of the southern resort island of Jeju.
It is the first such launch in South Korea since 2013 when the country successfully put a small satellite into orbit after failures in 2009 and 2010.
However, the impact of the 2013 launch was widely discounted because the launch vehicle had to depend on a Russian-developed engine for its first stage.
For the rocket’s next launch slated for 2021, KSLV-2 will use five of the newly developed engines, a cluster of four for the first stage, another one for the second stage and a small, seven-tonne thrust engine for the third stage, as per Jin-gyu.
Today’s test was successful because the engine combustion was maintained for over 140 seconds during the test launch, added Jin-gyu.
The KSLV-2 rocket is South Korea’s first spacecraft wholly designed and built by the country itself. It will be used to place satellites into the Earth’s orbit and for other commercial uses.
https://www.ndtv.com/science/s-korea-successfully-tests-space-rocket-engine-1954620
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Source: Asgardia Space News
