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SEOUL - North Korea said Thursday that its second attempt at launching a military spy satellite - officially, according to Pyongyang, a "space launch vehicle" - failed. But it vowed to try again in October.
The launch prompted emergency alerts and evacuation warnings in Japan's southernmost prefecture of Okinawa, although they were later lifted.
North Korea again sought to put a spy satellite in orbit after its first attempt, in May, failed because of second-stage flight issues. The latest effort failed because of "an error in the emergency blasting system during the third-stage flight," according to the official Korean Central News Agency in Pyongyang. The first and second stages of the rocket operated normally, the state news agency said.
South Korea said it detected what the North called a space launch vehicle flying above international waters west of the Korean Peninsula. The South's military tracked the flight from its liftoff at about 3:50 a.m. from the North's Tongchang-ri area and also declared it a failure.
Pyongyang had warned in May that the Kim regime needed a "reliable reconnaissance information system" so that it could keep "a grip on enemy military activities in real time," citing joint military drills between the United States and South Korea. The North's latest launch came as the two allies are conducting 11-day-long exercises, which include field training events based on war scenarios.
North Korea's first attempt at a satellite launch, on May 31, failed when "serious" defects caused the second stage of the new type of rocket to malfunction. It lost thrust midair because of engine failure and fell into the sea between South Korea and China, landing in the sea border between their exclusive economic zones. Some of the debris from the satellite launch was recovered by South Korea's military, which said the satellite was not advanced enough to conduct space-based reconnaissance.
The North Korean military at the time vowed to "conduct the second launch as soon as possible through various part tests."
Days before Thursday's launch, North Korea had notified Japan that it planned to launch a satellite between Aug. 24 and Aug. 31, without specifying the type of satellite.
Tokyo said Thursday that parts of the North Korean rocket appear to have fallen into the sea between Japan and the Korean Peninsula, the East China Sea and the Pacific Ocean outside the maritime zones announced earlier by Pyongyang.
The United States, South Korea and Japan all condemned the launch, which is considered a breach of United Nations Security Council resolutions that punish the regime for using ballistic missile technology.
North Korea has proved it can master difficult technology through repeated testing and refining. After numerous missile failures in 2017, North Korea successfully launched its first intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) - on a "lofted" trajectory, so it went up and fell into the sea.
Since then, it has refined its technology, firing more than 100 missiles since the beginning of 2022. While many of these represent only incremental progress, leader Kim Jong Un last month presided over the second test of a solid-fuel ICBM, the Hwasong-18.
Missiles propelled by solid-fuel propellants are easier to operate than liquid-propelled missiles and faster to deploy as they can be wheeled into place and launched immediately, without the kind of preparations required for liquid-propelled missiles. That makes them harder to detect in advance.