A nice post-mortem of the North Korea rocket launch

Almost Everything You�ve Heard About the North Korean Space Launch Is Wrong
Last week, North Korea finally managed to put an object into orbit around the Earth after 14 years of trying. The event was greeted with hysterical headlines, about how the whole thing was a likely a missile test and most certainly a failure of Western intelligence. Most of those headlines were dead wrong.

There are many questions yet to be answered about this launch and what it means. Some of them will take weeks or months to determine, others may never be answered satisfactorily. But there�s enough information already in the public domain to answer basic questions about the launch. News flash: Most of the initial reports about it were total misfires.