South Korea’s space authorities set 7 October for the fifth flight of the country’s Nuri rocket. The flight was assigned 15 spacecraft for orbital deployment. The Korea AeroSpace Administration, known as KASA, announced the schedule on 27 August after the mission had been postponed earlier in the month.
The mission was planned from Naro Space Center in Goheung, a southern coastal community about 473 kilometres from Seoul. KASA said liftoff could occur during the hour beginning at 12:23 p.m. and ending at 1:23 p.m. The precise departure time was to be chosen on launch day. The agency also reserved 8–14 October as alternative dates in case the rocket could not fly on the first scheduled day.
The payload represented Nuri’s largest satellite count to that point. Among the 15 spacecraft was a five-member nanosatellite constellation. KASA said the satellites were at the space centre and undergoing functional checks ahead of the mission. The total was two higher than the 13 satellites placed in space during Nuri’s fourth flight in November 2025.
Nuri’s previous launches provided the operational background for the October plan. Its first flight, conducted in October 2021, carried a 1.5-tonne dummy satellite but did not deliver it to orbit. A second attempt in June 2022 succeeded in orbiting a Performance Verification Satellite along with another dummy payload weighing 1.3 tonnes.
The third mission followed in May 2023. On that flight, the rocket deployed one next-generation small satellite and seven CubeSats. The fourth launch in November 2025 then delivered 13 satellites, establishing the immediate benchmark for the larger manifest prepared for flight five.
That sequence left the first attempt as the only earlier Nuri flight in the supplied account that failed to attain orbit. It also put the planned mission after three reported deployment successes: the June 2022 verification flight, the eight-satellite mission in May 2023 and the 13-satellite launch of November 2025. The new manifest would increase the spacecraft count again without changing the stated objective of orbital delivery.
Taken together, the schedule gave the fifth mission both a primary date and a seven-day fallback period. It also left the exact liftoff time open within the announced hour, allowing the final choice to be made on 7 October. As of the 27 August announcement, the public plan covered the launch timing, location and payload composition; it did not constitute a completed mission.
The Korea Times also reported the 7 October date, the one-hour period and the 8–14 October reserve window. Its account and Yonhap’s more detailed report both attributed the timetable to KASA. The supplied reporting did not give a cause for the earlier postponement, so no reason is assigned here.
