DIFFERING CONCEPTS OF SPACE AND ITS CONSEQUENT IMPACT IN KOREAN SPACE POLICY

摘要

People understand space by their own views and make their own concepts of space. These concepts affect tospace policy including the direction and ways of space development. This paper tracks the dominance of technicalsystem development in the Korean space policy to different understandings and imageries of space by participants inthe Korean space policy. In the time span of a quarter century, Korea has achieved remarkable success in spacedevelopment, due to numerous participants devoting their passion and effort to it. These participants held differentinterests and motivations, however, with some more interested in space systems and others in space science. Stillothers were attracted to applications of space technology or to humans in space. These varying interests largelymirror the different conceptions held by different participants of what "space" is. The nine professional societies inKorean space field were selected for this research and they cover most space related fields of the Korean spacedevelopment from system engineering to application of space technology and to human in space. Under thesecategories, space scientists concentrate their efforts to know space and engineers focus on development of spacetechnologies and systems to go to space. The experts of space technology application focus on the human life in theearth with space technologies and the experts of human in space want to support the people in activity in space. Thisresearch reveals that Korean space development has been led by space engineers more than by space scientists andthe former's perception of space as the object to develop and explore rather than understand heavily inuenced thedesign and implementation of various Korean space plans. This research finds the reason of biased spacedevelopment in Korea from the biased participation of the space experts in the process of planning and decisionmaking. Because engineers have had much higher proportion of participating researchers when Korea made plan ofspace development and conformed these plans, engineering perspective has dominated plans and policy. Fortransition from a catch-up country to the next stage, Korea should modify their strategy from focusing on technologyand system development to embrace various kinds of field related space.