Determined to join the ranks of global space powers, South Korea today officially launched a new agency to take charge of the effort. The primary mandate of the new Korea AeroSpace Administration (KASA)—modeled on the United States’s NASA—is to build up the country’s commercial launch and satellite capabilities. But the government has also tasked the agency with landing spacecraft on the Moon by 2032, on Mars by 2045, and fostering leading edge science.
“Scientists who work on the Solar System and space explorations are quite excited,” says theoretical astrophysicist Sungsoo Kim of Kyung Hee University.
KASA unites under one roof space programs previously scattered across the government. Its creation fulfills a campaign promise made by South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol, who took office in May 2022. Yoon sees a stronger space program as boosting economic growth, and a government plan calls for roughly doubling spending on space-related programs to 1.5 trillion won ($1.1 billion) over 5 years from 2022 to 2027.
Much of that funding would go to developing rockets, satellites, and other technologies that have commercial applications. But the plan from the National Space Committee also calls for KASA to promote “leading space science research that can contribute to the expansion of human knowledge.”
The plan builds on a recent success. The country’s first space exploration mission, the Korea Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter (KPLO), carries five scientific instruments that are gathering data on the Moon’s weathering, magnetic field, and permanently shadowed craters. Launched on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket in August 2022, the mission was originally planned to last 1 year but has been extended through 2025. Kim says it demonstrates that South Korean researchers can contribute to space science.
This year, about 6% of South Korea’s space budget, or about $45 million, will go to science and exploration. But that funding is expected to increase, and KASA has recruited John Lee, a Korean American who was an executive at NASA for nearly 30 years, to be KASA deputy administrator in charge of missions and R&D. Lee has “extensive experience in scientific missions,” says Sangwoo Shin, a space policy researcher at the Korea Aerospace Research Institute (KARI).
There’s no shortage of ideas. A team led by Kyung-Suk Cho, a solar physicist at the Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute (KASI), is studying the feasibility of placing a satellite to monitor solar activity from the Sun-Earth Lagrangian point L4, a “parking spot” where gravitational forces help keep satellites in a fixed position with minimal fuel consumption. Observations from that vantage could probe solar phenomena and provide warnings of solar eruptions that might threaten astronauts.
A different KASI group is developing a 3.5-meter-diameter segmented mirror that could equip a space telescope tailored to observe niche targets. The project “is also meant to identify the technologies that Korea needs to develop” for future missions, says Jeong-Yeol Han, an engineer at the institute. The group is aiming for a late 2030s launch.
As a follow-on to KPLO, there could be another lunar orbiter. And KARI researchers are already envisioning the planned lunar lander, which could carry a rover and several scientific payloads. Researchers have also considered a mission to an asteroid, possibly to return samples, and a Mars orbiter capable of scientific observations that could precede a landing on the planet. But such ideas “need more definition,” Shin says.
Finding enough technical talent to carry out such missions could be a challenge, he adds, given a “growing demand for space scientists.” South Korean scientists now working overseas could help fill the gap. So could researchers at foreign space agencies, he says, given that KASA missions “will be carried out with the premise of international collaboration.”
Cho, however, is excited by KASA’s potential to support home-grown science. For 30 years, he notes, he has relied on data from U.S., European, and Japanese observation satellites to produce his 150-plus scientific papers. But relatively soon, he says, those data could come from a South Korean spacecraft. “I have always hoped,” Cho says, “that one day Korea would undertake space missions capable of producing world-class scientific achievements.”
More: https://www.science.org/content/article/south-korea-launches-its-own-nasa
