"Where's the kaboom? There was supposed to be an earth-shattering kaboom?"

North Korea decided to intimidate the world with a missile test. There may not have been an earth-shattering kaboom, but the North Korean government can at least console itself with the fact that there was at least a kaboom:

North Korea launched a multistage rocket Friday morning, again defying countries that want it to stop pursuing advanced weapons, but it blew up less than two minutes into flight and parts crashed in the Yellow Sea off South Korea.

Despite the failure, the U.S. and its allies quickly condemned the launch, with the White House saying that a food agreement it had reached with Pyongyang in February was dead. But the launch also denied North Korea a key propaganda victory and raised questions about the state of its ballistic missile technology.
The rocket took off at 7:39 a.m. local time from a new launch facility in the country's northwest corner and flew south toward Japan's Ryukyu Islands, the Philippines, Indonesia and Australia.

It apparently exploded about 80 seconds into flight, roughly the time its first stage should have burned out and second stage kicked in, U.S. and South Korean defense officials said.
Pyongyang issued a brief statement saying, "The earth observation satellite failed to enter its preset orbit," and added that its scientists were "looking into the cause of the failure."

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