Two weeks after the failed launch of the North Korean satellite, the South Korean navy continues its wreckage recovery operations. The rocket fired by Pyongyang crashed in the China Sea and it is difficult to find what remains of the launcher. However, the South Korean navy has seen its Chinese counterpart arrive at the scene with the same objective, in what now appears to be a race for the remains.
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It is a real race that is taking place two hundred kilometers from the Korean coast, almost in the middle of the China Sea that separates Beijing from Seoul. This is a complicated recovery operation, both because of the danger of the rocket components and the difficulty of reaching them when they sink into the sea, reports our correspondent in Seoul, Célio Fioretti.
Far from seeing a reinforcement arrive, the South Korean navy has seen a competitor arrive in the fishing zone, China. It is difficult to know what motivates this rival in the race, but experts are considering two theories. First, China could fish up the remains and deliver them to North Korea.
Intense competition in the China Sea
Another theory is that China might recover the remains in its own interest, to avoid an embarrassing international investigation. In fact, in 2014, North Korea’s Unha-3 rocket was studied by the UN and many of its components were found to be of Chinese, American, and even South Korean origin. Be that as it may, the competition remains intense in the China Sea, and the first to grab the wreckage will win the game.
North Korea announced Wednesday that it had attempted to launch a “military reconnaissance satellite” but it had “crashed into the sea” after triggering a missile alert in Japan and an erroneous evacuation order in Seoul. “The new Cheollima-1 satellite transport rocket crashed into the West Sea,” the Korean name for the Yellow Sea, said the state news agency KCNA, explaining the failure as “a loss of thrust due to abnormal start-up of the second stage engine after the first stage separated during normal flight”.
The projectile “quickly disappeared from radar before reaching the expected drop point,” according to the South Korean army, quoted by the Yonhap news agency.
