They haven't attacked anybody, ya can't just go around dropping bombs and still call yourself the "good guy".

Maybe not lay waste to his palaces (yet), but this needs to be addressed and it needs to be dealt with NOW. Despite the rosy outlook by the western press calling it a "failure" and the opposite declaration by the North Korean state press, calling it a "success", it's somewhere in between.

Joseph Bermudez is a leading world expert on North Korean rocketry for the British-based Jane's Defense Group. He says, regardless of the fate of the satellite, the first and second stages of Sunday's launch were noteworthy.

"It demonstrates that they were successful in staging and ground control, guidance, and a number of other technical issues," he said.

Bermudez says those first two stages of the launch will truly benefit the North Koreans, if they were able to capture all the real-time data the rocket produced moment-by-moment in its flight.

"It will tell them exactly what was happening on the system as it launched, and whether their calculations are correct. About speed, altitude, pressure, the health of the system, how much fuel is being used," added Bermudez, "that sort of information."

Ivan Oelrich, the Vice President of the Strategic Security Program at the Federation of American Scientists, says even if the satellite did not reach space, Sunday's launch is, in his words "a bad development." He says it is especially alarming in the context of Pyongyang's 2006 nuclear weapons test.

"There's no one that seriously believes that North Korea is interested in a low earth orbit communications satellite," said Oelrich. "This is a way for them to test a long-range rocket that has military applications."

Oelrich says North Korea does not need to develop its missile program to the same extent as more advanced countries, in order to benefit from it.

"The North Koreans probably don't want it for a normal kind of military deployment. They want to have one or two of these - perhaps armed with nuclear weapons," he said. "At least they want the world to believe that, that they can use for political leverage in the future."