The South Korean Navy may have recovered some of the debris from the country’s failed rocket launch yesterday, reports the Yonhap News Service. The debris was recovered just south of Jeju Island, Yonhap reported. Latest speculation from Seoul is that the rocket exploded just before the first stage engine was about to reach maximum thrust. The first stage was built by Russia. The two countries are working together to determine the cause of the failure.

Japan’s robotic asteroid sample return mission, Hayabusa, will return to Earth around midnight on Sunday, June 13, with a sample of the asteroid Itokawa. The final trajectory maneuver was successfully accomplished yesterday, placing the spacecraft on track for landing at Australia’s Woomera Test Range in the southern part of that country.

The spacecraft, also called Muses-C, was launched seven years ago from Japan’s Uchinoura launch site and has traveled approximately six billion kilometers. It landed on — and took off from — asteroid Itokawa in November 2005 and has been on its return trip ever since. A softball-sized target marker that guided the spacecraft to its landing with the names of 880,000 “little prices and princesses” engraved on it remains on the asteroid.

The mission survived many technical challenges, including the failure of all four of its ion engines. Japanese engineers were able to interconnect working components of different engines to create one that worked.

South Korea will try again to launch its KSLV-1 (Naro-1) launch vehicle on Thursday according to the Yonhap News Service. The launch was scheduled for today, but had to be postponed when the launch pad fire extinguisher system accidentally activated three hours before the planned launch. The weather for Thursday is a little iffy, however.

South Korea’s Science Minister told reporters that the KSLV-1 rocket launched today apparently exploded after liftoff. “An inboard camera detected a bright flash of light at 137 seconds into the flight, which coincides exactly with the loss of communication with the two stage rocket,” Yonhap News Service quoted the Minister, Ahn Byong-man, as saying. The camera was on the second stage. The first stage of the rocket was built by Russia, the second stage by South Korea.

South Korea scrubbed the launch of its KSLV-1 (Naro-1) launch vehicle today after the launch pad’s fire extinguisher system activated about three hours before the scheduled liftoff according to Yonhap News Service. All three fire extinguishers released liquid. None of it reportedly reached the launch vehicle although technicians are checking to see if any leaked under the pad. Until the investigation of what happened and why is completed, a new launch date cannot be set, said the news service.

South Korea will proceed with its planned launch of KSLV-1 (Naro-1) on Wednesday according to the Yonhap News Service. The launch is currently scheduled for 5:00 pm Seoul time (4:00 am EDT).

South Korea plans a second attempt to launch a payload into space this week on its KSLV-1 rocket, but “an unexpected problem in the electrical system” postponed today’s step of erecting the launch vehicle on the pad according to South Korea’s Yonhap News Agency. The Korea Space Launch Vehicle-1 (KSLV-1) is also known as Naro-1, after the name of its launch site 485 kilometers south of Seoul.

Yonhap reported that “unstable” signals from the ground measurement system led to the postponement. Earlier in the day, the plan was to erect the launch vehicle on the pad and hold a “dress rehearsal” in advance of the planned Wednesday launch. A decision on whether to proceed with the launch will be made after the situation is analyzed.

South Korea’s first attempt to put a satellite into orbit last year failed when a fairing did not separate properly. Russia builds the first stage of the rocket; South Korea builds the second stage and the fairing.

The BBC reports that Jean-Jacques Dordain may be reappointed as Director General (DG) of the European Space Agency (ESA).

Dordain, a Frenchman, became DG in 2003 and is nearing the end of his second term. He was expected to be replaced by a German as head of the intergovernmental organization. The leading German candidate, Jan Woerner, announced on Monday that he did not want the job, saying on his blog that consequently France and Germany were jointly proposing that Dordain be asked to stay,the BBC reported.

Dordain is the sixth DG of ESA. The others were:

• Roy Gibson (UK), 1975-1980
• Erik Quistgaard (Denmark), 1980-1984
• Reimar L st (Germany), 1984-1990
• Jean-Marie Luton (France), 1990-1997
• Antonio Rodot (Italy), 1997-2003

ESA’s 18 members are: Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, The Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.

Legendary Russian rocket designer Boris Chertok has edited a new book forecasting the next century of spaceflight. Russian cosmonaut Yuri Baturin outlined the book’s contents at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars this afternoon, emphasizing that it is a forecast, not a prediction.

The book’s 40 authors incorporated science and science fiction to put forward their best guess as to what the 21^st century will hold for the world, including for space activities. Somewhat surprisingly, they foresee little role for Russia in space past the 2020s, with the United States and China as the dominant players. They anticipate significant militarization of space and the first “space war” about 2050. They assert it will last two years and the results will be just like World War II – favorable to the United States. The pi ce de r sistance as the next century begins will be a “shocking event” according to Baturin: the first launch of an “artificial space pilot: not an automated device, but the product of artificial life.” It terms of its impact on humanity, he likened it to Yuri Gagarin’s 1961 flight that placed the first human into space.

The book was published two weeks ago and Baturin’s slides showed the English translation of the title as “Astronautics of XXI Century: Attempt of a Forecast of Development Till 2101.” Baturin donated a copy of the book to the Kennan Institute’s library at the Woodrow Wilson Center, noting that it undoubtedly is the first copy of the book in the United States. Chertok, 98, was the inspiration behind the book and is listed as its editor. In addition to being a cosmonaut, Baturin was an adviser to former Russian President Boris Yeltsin and has a background in law. He was a Research Scholar at the Kennan Institute in 1990 and worked with Chertok on this book.

Japan’s Daily Yomiuri newspaper reports that Japan’s Strategic Headquarters for Space Policy has recommended that the government more than double spending on Japan’s space industry, from 7 trillion yen to 15 trillion yen, over the next 10 years.

The Strategic Headquarters for Space Policy was created by Japan’s Basic Space Law in 2008. It is chaired by the Prime Minister. The advisory panel met Tuesday for the first time since the Democratic Party of Japan took power last fall. The newspaper also reported that a proposal to create a new agency to promote the space development industry was set aside “due to strong opposition within the coalition government.”