North Korea says it has successfully refloated a new destroyer that capsized upon launch last month, with state media reporting the damaged vessel will be moved to a dry dock in a different shipyard for repairs.
“After restoring the balance of the destroyer early in June, the team moored it at the pier by safely conducting its end launching on Thursday afternoon,” a report from the state-run Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) said.
A satellite photo taken by Planet Labs on June 5 showed the formerly stricken vessel righted and seemingly floating in water away from the pier where the disastrous launch took place.
Yeah a good analogy is refloating the Costa Concordia. They patched the hole and emptied the water and it certainly floated, fixing the hole in the hull wasn’t the problem. Refloating it didn’t return it to passenger service, it was just step one of being scrapped, because that’s all you can do with a ship like that short of completely rebuilding it from scratch. Repairing it would be vastly more complex, risky, and expensive than simply replacing it. It’s salvage and scrap, that’s all. You get it out of the way so its not blocking your route as a hazard to navigation, anything you can salvage you salvage, then you scrap it.
Now, on the other hand, if you wanted to do some theatrical performance of how you are the greatest and most resourceful country on Earth, you could certainly refloat it and jury rig it piecemeal until it looks like a perfectly functional ship again, as long as nobody has to go inside and it never has to perform any significant functions. If you want to use it as a floating barge to launch missiles from (like the first of its class, which is rumoured to have no engines as it has never been seen moving under its own power) then absolutely you can refloat it and use it for that no problem. That might be a good way to save face if you’re a recently-embarrassed despotic banana republic with nuclear weapons and no functioning economy, and plausibly that is what will happen here.