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“It’s a setback,” Jonathan McDowell, a Harvard astronomer who tracks satellites and rocket launchings, said of the North Korean launching. He added that the North Koreans must now find and fix the problem. “The missile doesn’t represent any kind of near-term threat.”

The United States Northern Command, based in Colorado Springs, issued a statement on Sunday that portrayed the launching as a major failure. It based its information on a maze of federal radars, spy ships and satellites that monitor global missile firings.

The command emphasized that “no object entered orbit,” apparently a reference to both the rocket’s third stage as well as the supposed satellite.

North Korea’s public portrayal of the event as a complete success was similar in its celebratory tone to the happy note it struck in 1998 after having failed to loft a satellite into orbit.

A general rule of engineering is that failures reveal more than successes. If so, North Korea — which has now test-fired three long-range rockets, each time unsuccessfully — is learning a lot about limitations.

“It’s not unusual to have a series of failures at the beginning of a missile program,” Jeffrey G. Lewis, an arms control specialist at the New America Foundation, a research group in Washington, said in an interview. “But they don’t test enough to develop confidence that they’re getting over the problems.”Dr. Lewis added that an influential 1998 report by Donald H. Rumsfeld, before he became secretary of defense in the Bush administration, argued that the North Korean rockets might be good enough to pose a threat to the United States, even without flight testing. “But given that both versions of the Taepodong-2 have failed now,” he said, “we have very little confidence in the reliability of the system.”

In August 1998, North Korea’s first attempt at launching a long-range rocket, the Taepodong-1, managed to scare Japan but failed to deliver a satellite to orbit. The troubles continued in July 2006 when its second test of a long-range missile, the Taepodong-2, ended in an explosion just seconds after liftoff.

The new case has been portrayed as a key test for President Dmitry Medvedev’s calls to reform the Russian legal system and end “legal nihilism” in the country. Legal experts have said that the charges are difficult to fathom, partly because they suggest that the two men stole the entire oil output of Yukos for six whole years without anyone noticing at the time.

Later during proceedings, the defence team said they wanted to call Mr Putin to the witness stand. Mr Khodorkovsky had met Mr Putin when the latter was Russian president to discuss the oil sector, said the defence team: “This witness is essential for understanding circumstances that are relevant to this case,” the lawyer Vadim Kluvgant told the court. Other top officials that the defence wishes to question are Nikolai Patrushev, the former head of Russia’s FSB spy agency, and Igor Sechin, a shadowy Kremlin figure who is now Russia’s top energy official and is widely rumoured to be behind the initial attack on Yukos.