>If you're trying for orbit, don't you usually launch east, so that you get a boost from earth's rotation? No, or rather it's somewhat more complicated. Yes th

>If you're trying for orbit, don't you usually launch east, so that you get a boost from earth's rotation? No, or rather it's somewhat more complicated. Yes there are many popular orbits (or deep space) where that's an advantage, but there are also lots of orbits where it's less so or even outright undesirable such as with polar orbits. Depending on the purpose of the launch in question it may be necessary to cancel out that energy which means it's actively more expensive to have it. Locations far from the equator get less either way and have to take that into account. Launch safety is critical too as well, nobody wants to have debris from a failed launch come down somewhere undesirable. For civilized countries that's anywhere that might cause damage, but even for dictatorships it'd include other countries they don't want to offend that specific way or alternatively to give insights into whatever they are launching that could come from wreckage analysis (failure in low first stage isn't going to mean stuff burns up like a deorbit). So even when a target orbit would indeed benefit from such a directly easterly launch, a dog leg is often part of it. Obviously NK is less than transparent about all this but the basic incentives are still there.