South Korea sets 7 October for Nuri’s fifth flight with a record 15 satellites

The Korea AeroSpace Administration set 7 October as the launch date for the fifth flight of Nuri, South Korea's homegrown orbital rocket. Liftoff from Launch Complex 2 at Naro Space Center in Goheung is planned between 12:23 p.m. and 1:23 p.m. local time. The exact minute will be chosen on the day. A backup window runs from 8 to 14 October if weather or a technical hold intervenes.

Nuri will carry 15 satellites, the largest manifest the vehicle has flown. Five of them are NEONSAT-2 through NEONSAT-6, earth-observation spacecraft built by KAIST's Satellite Technology Research Center as the first mass-produced batch of a national cluster. Ten CubeSats ride along. Administrator Oh Tae-seok called the flight a test of whether Nuri can place a constellation, not just a single payload, and whether Korean industry can build satellites in identical lots rather than as one-off instruments.

The fifth launch was first written onto the calendar for June, then August. Engineers at KASA and SaTReC found that thrusters on some of the nanosatellites were missing their specifications. Thrusters are the hardware that lets a cluster hold formation. The slip to October bought time to rework them. Function checks on the satellites are now under way at the space centre. Pad and tracking tests are finished. The 47.2-metre, 200-tonne three-stage rocket is in assembly on site.

Nuri's record is uneven in a useful way. The first flight, on 21 October 2021, reached altitude but the third stage cut off 46 seconds early and the dummy payload did not orbit. The second flight, on 21 June 2022, put a performance verification satellite and CubeSats into a 700-kilometre sun-synchronous orbit. The third, in May 2023, deployed a next-generation small satellite and seven CubeSats. The fourth, in November 2025, flew at night and placed 13 satellites, including CAS500-3. That fourth flight was the first in which Hanwha Aerospace led manufacturing and assembly.

Hanwha's role is the industrial point of the October mission. South Korea's Space Act is due to allow batch licensing from February 2027. A planned broadband constellation will need hundreds of identical buses. NEONSAT-2 through 6 are built from commercial parts rather than the custom stacks used on Arirang and CAS500. If they work on orbit, the procurement model changes. If they do not, the October flight becomes an expensive diagnosis.

The midday window is not cosmetic. The cluster is designed for frequent, precise imaging in support of security and disaster response. Lighting geometry at 12:23 to 13:23 on 7 October is the geometry the operators want on the first pass. Missing that hour does not kill the mission. It does change the first pictures.

Goheung sits 473 kilometres south of Seoul on the southern coast. For two hours on a Wednesday in October the town will again be the only place in the country that can put a Korean rocket under a Korean payload. KASA has two more Nuri flights scheduled through 2027 after this one. The fifth flight is the one that decides whether those later missions carry experiments or inventory.