Voice of America (VOA) says that North Korea appears to have completed a launch tower at the nation’s second missile launch facility.

The U.S. broadcaster cited as evidence new satellite imagery taken in the past month as revealing a completed launch umbilical tower at Tongchang-dong near the North Korea-China border by the Yellow Sea.

The report quoted Tim Brown, an image analyst and a senior fellow at Global Security.org, as saying that it took North Korea about a decade to finish the facility.

Brown said it can now confidently be said that the launch tower and the launch pad are basically finished, but that it's not known whether the North has a launch vehicle that's ready to be launched.

VOA says Brown and a colleague first spotted the facility in 2008, when it was still under construction, and that they were the first to publicly reveal it.