Musudan rocket set up

Though this web page is not focused on military affairs, today the Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS) sent out a picture of North Korea’s Taepodong 2 missile sitting on the launch pad at Musudan-ri. According to their email:

ISIS has obtained commercial satellite imagery from DigitalGlobe taken at approximately 11:00 AM local time on March 29, 2009 of the Musudan-ri missile site in North Korea. The missile is clearly visible in this image. It is also casting a shadow that is clearly differentiated from the missile launch gantry. According to news reports, the missile was installed on or after Tuesday, March 24, 2009. Since the missile is so easily seen in this image versus in imagery over the past several days since March 24 , it is likely that North Korea was previously shrouding the missile.

You may see the ISIS report here.

You can see the launch trajectory mapped out on Google Earth here.

As the T-2 will not threaten US territory, Uncle Sam has no plans to interfere with the launch.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 29th, 2009 at 7:56 pm and is filed under Google Earth, Military. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

Taunter

Wouldn’t we deny any plans to interfere, whether we were going to interfere or not? The North Koreans are the ones who have painted themselves into a corner with the announcement of the launch. We have the luxury of deciding whether to take a shot at their missile (think of it as a live fire exercise for our enormously expensive and unreliable interceptors) or sit back and try to monitor the program. Or do something unexpected – sink the Iranian monitoring ship, for example.

In any case, we might as well maintain plausible deniability, which has been helped by the Japanese announcing that they are deploying theater missile defense as well.

http://tauntermedia.com/2009/03/29/quite-wily-like-his-old-man/
gogriz91

This isn’t new territory, he’s launched two of these things before. It’s more problematic to shoot at the missile than to not shoot. If you hit it, where do the parts fall? If you miss, is all the money we sank into the SM-III or PAC-3 a waste? Lets see if it clears the pad and gets through the first two boosters, the last two haven’t.

North Korean Economy Watch

Musudan rocket set up