Nuri / KSLV-II — South Korea's first indigenous orbital launch

At exactly 4:00 p.m. on 21 June 2022, a white three-stage rocket rose off its pad at the Naro Space Center in Goheung, on South Korea's southern coast, riding the combined 300 tonnes of thrust from four Korean-built engines. Eight months earlier the country had watched the first Nuri climb flawlessly, only to fall agonisingly short when its third stage shut down 46 seconds early. This time the nation held its breath through every staging event, and the telemetry told a perfect story: third-stage burnout on time, payloads separated, orbit achieved.

Nuri, formally KSLV-II, was more than a decade and about two trillion won in the making, designed, built and tested entirely with domestic technology. Its predecessor Naro-1 had flown on a Russian-built first stage; Nuri's 47.2-metre, 200-tonne airframe was Korean from engines to avionics. The first flight's failure had been traced to a helium tank that shook loose inside the third-stage oxidizer tank, a subtle buoyancy effect missed in the fixture design. Engineers reinforced it, and on the second flight the vehicle delivered a 162.5-kilogram performance verification satellite and a 1.3-tonne mass simulator to a 700-kilometre sun-synchronous orbit.

With that, South Korea became the seventh country capable of placing a satellite of more than one tonne into orbit on a wholly homegrown launcher, joining Russia, the United States, France, China, Japan and India. In the days that followed, the verification satellite ejected four CubeSats built by Korean universities, each release a small graduation ceremony for the country's space programme. Nuri flew again in May 2023 carrying eight working satellites, and its technology is being transferred to Hanwha Aerospace, seeding a private Korean launch industry.