SEOUL, South Korea — South Korea's first domestically produced space rocket launched off the pad in Goheung but ultimately failed on its quest to deliver a dummy payload into orbit in its first test launch on Thursday.

South Korean President Moon Jae-in still described the test as an "excellent accomplishment" that takes the country a step further in its pursuit of a space launch program.

According to Reuters, the three-stage Nuri rocket rose from the launch pad at 5 p.m. local time Thursday. The spacecraft reached its desired altitude, but officials said the final stage appeared to shut down 40-50 seconds early. That meant that the payload did not reach the speed needed to get to its intended target.

Reuters says that officials are investigating whether a lack of pressure inside the fuel tank or control computer malfunctions were to blame for the shutdown.

"It's not long before we'll be able to launch it exactly into the target trajectory," Moon said, according to a transcript. "The 'Korea Space Age' is approaching."

South Korea is trying to become the 10th nation to send a satellite into space with its own technology. Officials say such an ability would be crucial for the country's space ambitions. Those ambitions include acquiring its own military intelligence satellites and sending a probe to the moon by 2030.

VAN HORN, Texas —

Jeff Bezos blasted into space Tuesday on his rocket company’s first flight with people on board, becoming the second billionaire in just over a week to ride his own spacecraft.

The Amazon founder was accompanied by a hand-picked group: his brother, an 18-year-old from the Netherlands and an 82-year-old aviation pioneer from Texas — the youngest and oldest to ever fly in space.

Named after America’s first astronaut, Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket soared from remote West Texas on the 52nd anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, a date chosen by Bezos for its historical significance. He held fast to it, even as Virgin Galactic’s Richard Branson pushed up his own flight from New Mexico in the race for space tourist dollars and beat him to space by nine days.

Unlike Branson’s piloted rocket plane, Bezos’ capsule was completely automated and required no official staff on board for the anticipated 10-minute, up-and-down flight.

Blue Origin was shooting for an altitude of roughly 66 miles, more than 10 miles higher than Branson’s July 11 ride. The 60-foot booster accelerated to Mach 3 or three times the speed of sound to get the capsule high enough, before separating and landing upright.

The passengers had several minutes of weightlessness to float around the spacious white capsule. The window-filled capsule landed under parachutes, with Bezos and his guests briefly experiencing nearly six times the force of gravity, or 6 G’s, on the way back.

Sharing Bezos’ dream-come-true adventure was Wally Funk, from the Dallas area, one of 13 female pilots who went through the same tests as NASA’s all-male astronaut corps in the early 1960s but never made it into space.

Joining them on the ultimate joyride was the company’s first paying customer, Oliver Daemen, a last-minute fill-in for the mystery winner of a $28 million auction who opted for a later flight. The Dutch teen’s father took part in the auction, and agreed on a lower undisclosed price last week when Blue Origin offered his son the vacated seat.

Blue Origin — founded by Bezos in 2000 in Kent, Washington, near Amazon’s Seattle headquarters — has yet to open ticket sales to the public or reveal the price. For now, it’s booking auction bidders. Two more passenger flights are planned by year’s end, said Blue Origin CEO Bob Smith.

The recycled rocket and capsule that carried up Tuesday’s passengers were used on the last two space demos, according to company officials.

Virgin Galactic already has more than 600 reservations at $250,000 apiece. Founded by Branson in 2004, the company has sent crew into space four times and plans two more test flights from New Mexico before launching customers next year.

Blue Origin’s approach was slower and more deliberate. After 15 successful unoccupied test flights to space since 2015, Bezos finally declared it was time to put people on board. The Federal Aviation Administration agreed last week, approving the commercial space license.

Bezos, 57, who also owns The Washington Post, claimed the first seat. The next went to his 50-year-old brother, Mark Bezos, an investor and volunteer firefighter, then Funk and Daemen. They spent two days together in training.

University of Chicago space historian Jordan Bimm said the passenger makeup is truly remarkable. Imagine if the head of NASA decided he wanted to launch in 1961 instead of Alan Shepard on the first U.S. spaceflight, he said in an email.

“That would have been unthinkable!” Bimm said. "It shows just how much the idea of who and what space is for has changed in the last 60 years.”

Bezos stepped down earlier this month as Amazon’s CEO and just last week donated $200 million to renovate the National Air and Space Museum. Most of the $28 million from the auction has been distributed to space advocacy and education groups, with the rest benefiting Blue Origin’s Club for the Future, its own education effort.

Fewer than 600 people have reached the edge of space or beyond. Until Tuesday, the youngest was 25-year-old Soviet cosmonaut Gherman Titov and the oldest at 77 was Mercury-turned-shuttle astronaut John Glenn.

Both Bezos and Branson want to drastically increase those overall numbers, as does SpaceX’s Elon Musk, who’s skipping brief space hops and sending his private clients straight to orbit for tens of millions apiece, with the first flight coming up in September.

Despite appearances, Bezos and Branson insist they weren’t trying to outdo each other by strapping in themselves. Bezos noted this week that only one person can lay claim to being first in space: Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, who rocketed into orbit on April 12, 1961.

“This isn’t a competition, this is about building a road to space so that future generations can do incredible things in space,” he said on NBC’s ”Today.”

Blue Origin is working on a massive rocket, New Glenn, to put payloads and people into orbit from Cape Canaveral, Florida. The company also wants to put astronauts back on the moon with its proposed lunar lander Blue Moon; it’s challenging NASA’s sole contract award to SpaceX.

The large Chinese rocket that is out of control and set to reenter Earth's atmosphere this weekend has brought about an alarming but not unprecedented situation.

Space debris has crashed into Earth on a number of occasions, including last year.

The good news is that debris plunging toward Earth — while unnerving — generally poses very little threat to personal safety. As Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at the Astrophysics Center at Harvard University, told CNN: "This is not the end of days."

Still, the episode has fueled fresh questions about space debris, uncontrolled reentry and what precautions might need to be taken, if any.

Here's what you need to know:

How often does uncontrolled space debris crash into Earth?

Most pieces will burn up in the Earth's atmosphere before having a chance to make an impact on the surface. But parts of larger objects, like rockets, can survive reentry and potentially reach populated areas.

Last year, one of the largest pieces of uncontrolled space debris ever passed directly over Los Angeles and Central Park in New York City before landing in the Atlantic Ocean.

Weighing in at nearly 20 tons, the debris — an empty core stage from a Chinese rocket — was the largest piece of space junk to fall uncontrolled back to Earth since 1991 and the fourth biggest ever.

The only larger pieces were from NASA's Skylab space station in 1979, Skylab's rocket stage in 1975 and the Soviet Union's Salyut 7 space station in 1991. The space shuttle Columbia from 2003 could be added to that list since NASA lost control of it on its descent back to Earth.

This doesn't happen more often because space agencies around the world have generally tried to avoid leaving big objects in orbit that have the potential to reenter Earth's atmosphere and that they cannot control.

"Norms have been established," McDowell said. "There's no international law or rule — nothing specific — but the practice of countries around the world has been: 'Yeah, for the bigger rockets, let's not leave our trash in orbit in this way.'"

The Chinese rocket set to enter Earth's atmosphere this weekend, however, is designed in a way that "leaves these big stages in low orbit," McDowell said.

"It's really not best practice compared to what other space agencies do. They go to quite fair lengths to avoid doing this."

How much debris is floating around in space?

A lot.

Above us there is a cloud of more than 9,000 tons of space junk — equivalent to the weight of 720 school buses.

This amounts to hundreds of thousands — possibly millions — of objects whirling around in orbit uncontrolled, including spent rocket boosters, dead satellites and detritus from military anti-satellite missile demonstrations.

The junk is heavily concentrated in areas of orbit closest to the Earth's surface. And, though it doesn't pose much of a risk to humans on the ground, it does threaten hoards of active satellites that provide all sorts of services, including tracking the weather, studying the Earth's climate and providing telecom services.

The debris also threatens the International Space Station, where crews of astronauts have lived since 2000 and which had to adjust its own orbit multiple times last year due to space debris.

"Just a few years ago, we had about a thousand working satellites in orbit, and now we have over 4,000," McDowell said. "We talk about the space age and we think about the 1960s, but this is really the space age starting now."

Complicating the problem is that space traffic experts still don't have a fully accurate map of the objects orbiting Earth.

Possible collisions are tracked using government and privately owned sensors on the ground that attempt to pinpoint exactly where everything is, but the process — at least for now — involves a lot of guesswork.

Is there any regulation in place?

The 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which remains the primary international document regulating activity in outer space, was agreed to at a time when only two governments were going to space.

Now that more countries and commercial companies are in the business of spaceflight, regulators are faced with a Catch-22: They don't want to create a lawless environment, but they're reticent to impose new rules for fear that other countries may become more dominant in space.

"Space is intrinsically global, right? A satellite passes over all the countries in the world in a few hours," McDowell said.

"And so having the U.S. take a position, it's not going to solve things. You really need some kind of international space traffic management agency — sort of like an air traffic control for space, but international."

When and where will the Chinese rocket reenter Earth's atmosphere?

The Chinese Long March 5B rocket is expected to enter Earth's atmosphere "around May 8," according to a statement from Defense Department spokesperson Mike Howard, who said the U.S. Space Command is tracking the rocket's trajectory.

The rocket's "exact entry point into the Earth's atmosphere" can't be pinpointed until within hours of reentry, Howard said, but the 18th Space Control Squadron will provide daily updates on the rocket's location through the Space Track website.

McDowell explained that pinpointing where debris could be headed is almost impossible at this point because of the speed the rocket is traveling — with even slight changes in circumstance drastically changing the trajectory.

"We expect it to reenter sometime between the eighth and 10th of May. And in that two-day period, it goes around the world 30 times. The thing is traveling at like 18,000 miles an hour. And so if you're an hour out at guessing when it comes down, you're 18,000 miles out in saying where."

Still, the ocean remains the safest bet for where the debris will land, he said, just because it takes up most of the Earth's surface.

What's the Biden administration saying?

White House press secretary Jen Psaki on Wednesday wouldn't say if the U.S. would commit to calling on China to pay compensation in the event of damage caused by the rocket.

"We're not at this point — we're certainly tracking its location through U.S. Space Command, and hopefully that's not the outcome that we are working through," she told reporters.

"Let me first say that U.S. Space Command is aware of and tracking the location of the Chinese Long March 5B in space, and obviously, the Space Command would have more specifics on that tracking and any additional details," Psaki said, adding that the U.S. "is committed to addressing the risks of growing congestion due to space debris and growing activity in space, and we want to work with the international community to promote leadership and responsible space behaviors."

A Defense Department spokesman told CNN the U.S. military is not considering a kinetic strike option to break up the rocket. The U.S. has demonstrated the capability in the past to shoot down debris entering the atmosphere.

Pentagon press secretary John Kirby said Wednesday that Space Command is tracking the rocket but that it is "too soon to explore options about what, if anything, can be done about this until we have a better sense of where it's coming down."

Should people take precautions?

No need, McDowell said.

"The risk that there will be some damage or that it would hit someone is pretty small — not negligible, it could happen — but the risk that it will hit you is incredibly tiny. And so I would not lose one second of sleep over this on a personal threat basis," he said.

"There are much bigger things to worry about."