Korea Aerospace Research Institute (KARI), KOGL Type 1, via Wikimedia Commons
The world that day
7.0 billion
People on Earth
3
Nations to launch a human
12
Humans to walk on the Moon
5,000
Known worlds beyond the Sun
01 / 03
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.
02 / 03
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.
03 / 03
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.
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We have arrived at a monumental moment not just in Korea's science technology history but for Korea's history as well.
Lee Jong-ho · Minister of Science and ICT, South Korea
By the numbers
Launch
21 Jun 2022, 16:00 KST (Naro Space Center)
Height
47.2 m
Liftoff mass
~200 t
Payload
162.5 kg verification satellite + 1.3 t mass simulator
Orbit
700 km sun-synchronous
Development cost
~2 trillion won (~US$1.6 billion)
Why it mattered
Nuri's success moved South Korea from space customer to space power. Independent orbital launch is a capability only a handful of countries possess, and the seventh seat at the heavy-satellite table gave Seoul strategic autonomy it had previously rented from foreign providers. The flight anchored a national roadmap that runs through the Danuri lunar orbiter, a planned lunar lander and the next-generation KSLV-III, and it kick-started commercialisation of the country's launch sector through technology transfer to private industry.
▸The first Nuri failed in October 2021 because a helium tank tore loose inside the third-stage oxidizer tank; investigators found the fixture design had not fully accounted for buoyancy that increases during flight.
▸South Korea's previous rocket, Naro-1, flew on a Russian-built first stage; Nuri is Korean down to its engines, the country's first fully indigenous orbital launcher.
▸Four university-built CubeSats rode to orbit tucked inside the performance verification satellite and were pushed out one at a time over the following days.
▸Nuri's first stage clusters four KRE-075 engines of 75 tonnes thrust each, every one designed and manufactured domestically.
▸The rocket's technology is being handed to Hanwha Aerospace, turning a government launcher into the seed of a private Korean launch industry.
