SEOUL: North Korean leader Kim Jong Un said the country has finished building its first military spy satellite and gave the green light for its launch, state media said Wednesday.
The report of its completion comes about a week after Pyongyang launched what it said was a new solid-fuel intercontinental ballistic missile, marking a major breakthrough in its banned weapons programmes.
Analysts have said there is significant technological overlap between the development of ICBMs and space launch capabilities.
Kim gave instructions on Tuesday to “make sure that the military reconnaissance satellite No. 1 completed as of April will be launched at the planned date,” the official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) reported.
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State media images showed Kim touring the space agency with his daughter. The items he was inspecting, as well as charts and other wall displays in some of the images were blurred out.
The development of a military reconnaissance satellite was one of the key defence projects outlined by Kim in 2021.
On Tuesday, he said gaining this reconnaissance technology was a “primary task to be indispensably fulfilled” because of what he descibed as threats and aggression from the United States and South Korea.
In December 2022, North Korea said it had carried out an “important final-stage test” for the development of a spy satellite, which it said it would complete by April this year.
At the time, experts in South Korea quickly raised doubts about the results, saying the quality of the black-and-white images released by North Korea—purportedly taken from a satellite—was poor.
Pyongyang has not provided a launch date, though on Tuesday, Kim said the satellite would be sent up “at the planned date”.
“It looks like the North will launch its ‘symbolic’ satellite for now, and upgrade it gradually,” An Chan-il, a defector-turned-researcher who runs the World Institute for North Korea Studies, told AFP.
“If China and Russia do not provide high-tech support, it will be difficult to carry out spying with North Korea’s own technology.”
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