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The Missile Assembly Building [MAB] is located in a valley to the West of the launch pad, and is oriented exactly due North. The MAB consists of a peaked-roof high bay, about 15 meters tall, 50 meters long and 16 meters wide, and an attached flat-roofed low bay to the West of equal length, about 5 meters tall and 7 meters wide. A 6 meter wide paved roadway, apparently constructed of concrete, circles with a radius of about 18 meters to the West of the MAB with entrances at the North and South ends of the high bay. The North entrace to the high bay is aligned with the center of the high bay, while the South high bay entrance is offset to the West. A paved parking apron, 30 meters long and 7 meters wide, is located to the West of the MAB, with a smaller paved surface connecting to the MAB low bay. The entire MAB complex lies within a cleared area, some 65 meters by 135 meters in extent, and possibly surrounded by a security perimeter, though no gate or other access control is evident at the roadway's exit from the cleared area at the North of the facility. The paved roadway ends after a U-turn to the North of the facility, with an unpaved continuation of roughly equal width running to the South of the facility.
Several much smaller structures are located at various distances, up to several hundred meters, to the South and North of the MAB. The appearance of these structures is generally consistent with that of agriculture-related structures noted elsewhere in the image, and they have no evident association with the Missile Assembly Building. No skylights are evident in the roof of the MAB, which almost certainly has internal electrical lighting. However, no electrical or other utilities are evidently associated with this facility, although these might either be underground or not readily apparent at the available one-meter resolution.
The MAB is evidently capable of holding at least one but probably no more than two complete Taepodong-2 missiles. This large missile consists of two stages, each about 15 meters long. As many as a handful of the smaller Taepodong-1 and Nodong-1 missiles could be stored in this facility, depending on the size of the transporter vehicle and the parking geometry within the high bay.
This one-meter resolution black-and-white image of Tae Po Dong, North Korea
was collected November 1, 1999 by Space Imaging's IKONOS satellite. The
image features the Tae Po Dong missile facility.
Credit: "spaceimaging.com."
