Unha-3 Rocket,Nord Korea

The Unha or Eunha is a Nord Korean expendable carrier rocket, which partially utilizes the same delivery system as the  Taepodong 2 long-range ballistic missile.
Western analysts believe the Unha-3 is a hybrid of Soviet and Iranian design, derived from the Taepodong-2 missile that North Korea began developing in the 1990s, but which has never successfully launched. No one in the West knows how much of the latest rocket and its engines were actually built inside North Korea.
North Korea has been rolling out ballistic missiles since the 1970s, when it first got Soviet Scud-B launchers from Egypt in return for help in the 1973 Arab-Israeli war. The first North Korean-built missiles—essentially Scud copies—were developed in the 1980s and were called the Hwasong-5 and the Hwasong-6.
By 1990, North Korea had produced an upgraded version called the Nodong, which had a longer range and greater payload capacity. (It was the Nodong that alarmed the West on July 4, 2009, when North Korea fired off seven of them from its east coast.) Next came the two-stage Taepodong-1 rocket (using a Hwasong atop a Nodong), which could deliver a one-ton payload up to 1,500 miles.

 

In August 1998, in North Korea’s first orbital attempt, a Taeopodong-1 with an additional third stage lifted off with a small satellite called Kwangmhyongsong-1 (“Bright Star 1”). The launch failed when the third stage didn’t ignite. North Korea then began working on a successor missile, called Taepodong-2, which launched only once, in July 2006; the missile blew up 40 seconds after launch. (An additional missile, called Taepodong-X, has not been tested, and little is known about it.)

The 91-ton, 100-foot-tall Unha-3 is a slightly modified version of the Unha-2 that North Korea launched eastward in 2009, a liftoff condemned by the United Nations Security Council, which considered it a ballistic missile test and soon thereafter tightened economic sanctions on the country. That orbital attempt—North Korea’s second—also ended in failure when the rocket’s third stage failed to ignite and fell into the Pacific Ocean.
The Unha-3’s first stage, about eight feet in diameter, appears to be made of steel and weighs about 60 tons, says Wright. “We’re pretty sure the first-stage engine is a Soviet design,” a scaled up version of the engine used in the Scud-B design, he says. It burns kerosene and nitric acid. The first stage has four such engines that share a common fuel tank.
The slimmer second stage is “a much more advanced design,” Wright says, that is identical to the submarine-launched Soviet R-27 ballistic missile, called the SS-N-6 in the United States. That stage has three engines: a main one for propulsion and two smaller ones for steering. “It’s not clear to me that they know how to build that engine,” says Wright. It burns a toxic, volatile, clear liquid fuel known as UDMH (unsymmetrical dimethylhydrazine) and nitrogen tetroxide. The Soviets first deployed he SS-N-6 in 1968. North Korea got some in the 1990s and modified them for use as intermediate-range missiles.

 The third stage appears to be identical to the upper stage of the Iranian Safir-2 booster, which Iran used to put a small satellite into orbit in February 2009. The Safir-2 uses the small steering motors from the SS-N-6 for propulsion.

Function	Expendable carrier rocket
Manufacturer	Korean Committee of Space Technology
Size
Height	32.01 metres (105.0 ft)
Diameter	2.41 metres (7 ft 11 in)
Mass	85,000 kilograms (190,000 lb)
Stages	3

Launch history
Status	Active
Launch sites	Sohae,Tonghae
Total launches	3
Successes	1

First stage
Engines	4 Nodong 2-1
Thrust	1100 kN
Specific impulse	252 sec
Burn time	120 seconds
Fuel	IRFNA,UDMH

Second stage
Engines	unknown
Thrust	250 kN
Specific impulse	255 s
Burn time	110 seconds
Fuel	IRFNA / UDMH

Third stage
Engines	unknown
Thrust	54 KN
Specific Impulse	230 sec
Burn time	40 seconds
Fuel	Unknown