On July 4, U.S. time, there was a volley of at least six launches from North Korean over a span of four hours. One of those liftoffs was the first Taep’o-dong-2A, or 2B or 2C/3-class rocket, perhaps topped by a satellite, according to Charles Vick, a Senior Fellow at GlobalSecurity.org in Alexandria, Virginia.

Vick has been busily monitoring statements by U.S. and Japanese officials and has pieced together an interesting saga about that booster’s failure. Somewhere between 35 and 42 seconds after takeoff, the launcher apparently lost its shroud – breaking apart during maximum dynamic pressure and falling into the Sea of Japan in chunks. The trajectory taken by the rocket was entirely typical of a satellite launch, the analyst has reported.

However, U.S. military intelligence officials noted that indeed the missile was “heading east” but that the tracking was quite difficult because of the shortened flight. It was further noted that the flight trajectory was more ballistic than would be expected to be seen for a satellite launch. So the possibility of a three stage ballistic missile flight with a dummy warhead seems plausible. But the short flight time of the rocket leaves the true mission objective an open issue, Vick said.

Still, there’s been an intelligence windfall about the launch, Vick added:

“Sampling of the exhaust gases traveling through the global atmosphere winds as well as flame imagery of the launch would define the booster’s propellant with considerable certainty. Radar bathing of the launch vehicle along with thermal imaging and photo imaging would define its structures, design detail,” Vick suggested. “Signals intelligence SIGINT and RADINT radar intelligence would define the thrust, specific impulse, burn times, velocities, range ground track and altitude events performance trajectory information.”

Therefore, combining all sources of intelligence data would allow the U.S. intelligence community “to literally set up a launch vehicle operator’s manual for this vehicle operations capability and limitations for an accurate threat analysis profile,” Vick reported.