Western powers always stop countries before they get the ability to make reliable ICBMs. Brazil was making some good progress on their satellite launcher, but I believe there US wasn't too happy the rocket used solid fuels, and solid fuel rockets, as we all know, are excellent for ICBMs because they can be launched as soon as they are pointing up-ish.

So, the lesson is to not make something with obvious military applications, because only big kids can have these toys, and your factories tend to explode (as if rockets themselves weren't already dangerous by themselves) if you continue.

No, the text is misleading, confusing altitude with orbiting. This was a sounding rocket.[1] Upon jumping 145 km high, it might wave as something orbital zoomed by it at 8 km/s, but it very wasn't one itself. A similar sounding rocket[2] is like half the mass of the world's smallest orbital rocket[3].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sounding_rocket [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrier_Orion [3] https://global.jaxa.jp/press/2018/04/20180427_guinness.html https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jBUFNgLrykc (Scott Manley)

OP> The Cedar-4 was a three-stage rocket capable of reaching an altitude of 145 kilometres, thus entering the low Earth orbit (LEO) zone, and blasting past their record of two kilometres in 1961. LEO is where most satellite and human space flight activities take place. In every sense then, the Cedar-4 was a modern rocket; it rose over the Kármán line, considered the boundary between Earth's atmosphere and space, and the ability to reach LEO opened up possibilities previously unimagined.

"[A]bility to reach LEO"? Well, in the unusual sense that a 5-year old cutting across the campus has "reached Harvard".