Taiwan's National Chung Shan Institute of Science and Technology announced last Wednesday that a satellite launch vehicle test at the Jiupeng Base (九鵬基地) in Pingtung veered off course early in flight and triggered its self destruct system, sending debris down into a restricted zone in the mountains of Mudan Township. No one was hurt and no property was damaged. Chang Cheng, director of Taoyuan's Economic Development Bureau and a former chief engineer on the institute's Hsiung Feng III missile program, wrote afterward that the setback should not be read as a pure failure, arguing that in his years of systems engineering experience, extracting lessons from a failed test and using that data to refine the next attempt is simply how cutting edge technology gets built.
Public reporting and independent observers have linked the launch to the Kirin Project, a program the institute has developed quietly for years with the apparent goal of putting satellites weighing 50 to 200 kilograms into low earth orbit. Rocket technology carries an unavoidable dual use shadow: the same engineering that lifts a satellite into a higher orbit can just as easily extend a missile's range, which is why the technology is tightly restricted internationally and why most countries that want it have little choice but to build it themselves.
A Secretive Program With Strategic Stakes
According to people familiar with the test, this was Taiwan's first attempt at launching a satellite carrier vehicle, and no satellite was aboard. Because it was a first attempt, engineers had already built in failure protocols and safety controls, and the wreckage, engine and debris all came down inside a pre designated safety zone as planned.
Most countries currently operate low earth orbit satellites at altitudes between roughly 500 and 2,000 kilometers. Chang argued that if Taiwan's launch vehicle can reach 500 kilometers in altitude, adjusting its trajectory from a straight vertical climb to an optimized parabolic arc that follows the curve of the earth could, in theory, roughly double that distance into a horizontal range of 1,500 to 2,000 kilometers with additional engineering work, a range that falls squarely within the international definition of a medium range ballistic missile.
SpaceX Nearly Went Bankrupt Before Its Rocket Ever Worked
The record shows that no country has found a shortcut to building its own rocket. Failed tests are the norm, the money required is enormous, and patience is non negotiable. Elon Musk, now the public face of the world's dominant commercial rocket company, founded SpaceX in 2002 promising to build a reusable rocket unlike anything that had come before, a claim that drew plenty of skepticism from investors and the tech industry alike.
His first rocket, Falcon 1, failed three consecutive times between March 2006 and August 2008, and the fiery footage from each attempt became a favorite target for critics. Musk had put roughly 100 million dollars of his own money into the company, worth about 155 million dollars today, and three failed launches had all but burned through it. A fourth failure in September 2008 would very likely have shut SpaceX down for good.
Musk later described just how threadbare the operation was in a 2017 talk in Australia, recalling that the company started with only a handful of people who barely knew how to build a rocket, and that he ended up serving as chief engineer largely because he could not afford to hire anyone more experienced. "We screwed up the first three launches," he said. "After those three failures, I only had enough money left for one more attempt. If that one had failed too, SpaceX would have been finished. Thankfully, the fourth launch worked."
A Working Rocket Built Spacex's Real Business
That fourth Falcon 1 launch finally reached orbit, the first real proof that Musk's 2002 vow to revolutionize space technology might come true. Three months later, the success helped SpaceX land a 1.6 billion dollar commercial resupply contract with NASA, pulling the company back from the edge of collapse.
Wu Tsung Hsin (吳宗信), director of Taiwan's National Space Organization and a longtime observer of rocket programs worldwide, offered his own read on Musk's strategy during a 2022 interview at a short range research rocket launch on Pingtung's coast. Wu said Musk's decision to perfect the rocket first, before building out a satellite business, was deliberate: once you fully control the vehicle that gets payloads into space, you can launch on your own schedule, and the real profit comes later, from the services built on top of that capability.
South Korea's Twelve Year Climb To Its Own Rocket
South Korea offers a comparable case study in building heavy lift capability from scratch. In June 2022, its domestically developed Nuri rocket reached orbit on its second attempt, delivering a satellite weighing 1.9 metric tons into low earth orbit. That success made South Korea only the seventh country able to put a payload heavier than one ton into orbit using a rocket built at home. Wu noted that of the roughly 12 to 13 countries capable of launching satellites at the time, few could handle a payload in the 1,500 to 1,900 kilogram range that Nuri achieved.
South Korea's liquid fueled engine technology originally traced back to Russia, but when Seoul tried to purchase the underlying engine technology outright, Moscow refused to sell it. That refusal pushed South Korea to launch the second phase of its Korea Space Launch Vehicle program in 2010, aiming for a rocket built almost entirely with domestic parts, a project that eventually produced Nuri. Wu said the program took 12 years and cost roughly 1.5 billion dollars, or about 3 to 4 billion New Taiwan dollars annually, drawing in more than 300 domestic companies to manufacture somewhere between 30,000 and 40,000 individual components.
The histories of Musk's Falcon 1 and South Korea's Nuri point to the same lesson for Taiwan: whether the goal is a homemade fighter jet, warship or rocket, building an indigenous capability from nothing takes years of sustained investment even when the technical talent and funding are already in place, and setbacks along the way tend to be the price of admission rather than a sign of failure.
