Best Korea says the reason they needed to launch the missile was to send a weather satellite into space. A question does come to mind; what possible need might the Best Koreans have with a weather satellite? I mean, the country is incapable of producing more than a minimal amount of electric power, meaning most of the citizenry wouldn't have the juice to power up radios and TVs for more than an hour a day to listen to Best Korea's version of AccuWeather.
I am shitfitter; hear me roar.
It was a missile test, not a failed satellite launch. They clearly weren't trying to launch a satellite - the relatively far northern latitude makes reaching space really hard (you a lot more impulse than you would closer to the equator) and orbital insertion nearly impossible (if they were aiming for anything, it was a polar orbit). NASA would probably consider a launch under those circumstances to be an iffy proposition - the missile engineers who worked on this I'm sure were aware that there was simply no way they were getting anywhere near space, but they could get some data on how their engines work.
The DPRK go to test a missile that blew up outside of telemetry range anyways and they put a happy face on it by calling it a failed satellite launch. They are still going to get their foreign aid cut, and then they'll go do another nuke test. Apparently, Kim Jong Un is quite satisfied to be the lord of an isolated shithole rather than trying to improve relations with the rest of the world.
by Wallace Stevens
I
Do you remember how the rocket went on
And on, at night, exploding finally
In an ovation of resplendent forms -
Ovation on ovation of large blue men
In pantaloons of fire and of Women hatched,
Like molten citizens of the vacuum?
Do you remember the children there like wicks,
That constantly sparkled their small gold? The town
Had crowded into the rocket and touched the fuse.
That night, Liadoff, a long time after his death,
At a piano in a cloud sat practicing,
On a black piano practiced epi-tones.
Do you remember what the townsmen said,
As they fell down, as they heard Liadoff's cloud
And its tragical, its haunted arpeggios?
And is it true that what they said, as they fell,
Was repeated by Liadoff in a narration
Of incredible colors ex, ex and ex and out?
II
The feeling of Liadoff was changed. It is
The instant of the change that was the poem,
When the cloud pressed suddenly the whole return
From thought, like a violent pulse in the cloud itself,
As if Liadoff no longer remained a ghost
And, being straw, turned green, lived backward,
shared
The fantastic fortune of fantastic blood,
Until his body smothered him, until
His being felt the need of soaring, the need
Of air . . . But then that cloud, that piano placed
Just where it was, oh beau Caboose . . . It was part
Of the instant to perceive, after the shock,
That the rocket was only an inferior cloud.
There was no difference between the town
And him. Both Wanted the same thing. Both Sought
His epitones, the colors of the ear,
The sounds that soon become a voluble speech -
Voluble but archaic and hard to hear.
