According to reports from North Korean news agency Korean Central News Agency (KCNA), on May 16th, Kim Jong Un personally laid eyes on a military satellite and approved its progress. The satellite will be the first of its kind for North Korea, and according to the report, when Kim also blessed off on the plans for the non-permanent satellite to be launched into space.
While there has been no announcement as to the exact date of the launch, what type of data it will gather, or where it will be located, it goes along with a previous story from KCNA about a spy satellite Kim had been working on. According to Kim, the satellite remains an “urgent requirement of the prevailing security environment of the country.”
In a report back at the beginning of the year, KCNA claimed that the spy satellite had been completed and Kim was pushing to have the timeline sped up. In recent days, North Korea’s Sohae Satellite Launching Station has seen its first activity in six months according to 38 North. This group is a US-based North Korean monitoring project that has been reviewing its own satellite data of the area. According to them, Kim still has a laundry list to do before launching.
Should Kim even attempt to launch this satellite, Americans should be concerned. His plans have long had a science fiction twist to them, and with the propaganda his country has been putting out about the American government, this seems like a bad Looney Tunes movie coming to life. A simple spy satellite could easily be manipulated while in the air to conduct untold damage to our satellites and wipe out a lot of our technology in one fell swoop.
