Perigee Aerospace

Perigee Aerospace is a South Korean end-to-end space mobility company founded in 2018 by Yoon Shin, developing high-performance small launch vehicles and propulsion systems to provide sustainable, reliable, and efficient access to Earth orbit. The company operates from its Rocket Development Complex in Okcheon-gun (Chungcheongbuk-do), a Rocket Research Center with vertical engine test stands, a Future Tech Lab for satellite propulsion and electronics, and its headquarters in Daejeon, South Korea.

Perigee's flagship product is the Blue Whale family of liquid methane (LOX/LNG) rockets. Blue Whale 0.1, an educational sounding rocket, launched from Jeju in December 2021 and became South Korea's first civilian liquid-propellant rocket. Blue Whale 0.4 is a suborbital research vehicle for microgravity payloads and technology demonstrations, and Blue Whale 1 is the company's two-stage orbital launch vehicle, capable of delivering up to 200 kg to a 500 km sun-synchronous orbit using nine turbopump-fed BLUE 1S main-stage engines and a single pressure-fed SKYBLUE upper-stage engine.

The company has developed five engine lineups in-house, accumulated over 5,000 seconds of total engine burn time, and secured 10+ R&D awards and contracts along with agreements to launch Blue Whale 1 from Esrange Space Center (Sweden) and Whalers Way (Australia), including a collaboration with the Swedish Space Corporation (SSC).