IRAN’S first satellite launch aboard a home-grown rocket has left observers puzzled over just how it was done. Was the satellite launched by a feeble rocket pushed to its limits, or has Iran’s secretive space programme managed to develop a far more powerful launch vehicle without anyone noticing? The answer will affect how soon the country might achieve its stated goal of sending humans into space.
Iran launched its satellite – called Omid, or “Hope” – on 2 February. According to Iranian media it is a 40-centimetre cube weighing 25 kilograms, and is equipped with radio transmitters.
Foreign tracking stations and amateur watchers have been following , which is expected to decay over weeks or months due to atmospheric drag. At first, it was thought that the launch vehicle, called Safir-2, was derived from relatively feeble missiles that burn ambient-temperature liquid fuel, which Iran was already known to have. Two of these missiles stacked one top of the other could boost a third, small, solid-fuel rocket to a high enough speed and altitude for it to take a lightweight payload like Omid to orbit.
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But evidence has begun to emerge to suggest that the rocket might be more powerful than this. Amateur observers report that the last stage of the rocket, which is also in orbit, is much brighter than the satellite itself, suggesting it is too large to be the third stage of a relatively modest rocket.
Geoffrey Forden of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who specialises in the analysis of foreign countries’ launch capabilities, is one of those now , with a second stage that was much more powerful than anything Iran was known to possess.
If true, this would have important implications for Iran’s ambition to launch astronauts into space, something Reza Taghipour, head of Iran’s Aerospace Industries Organization, has said the country hopes to do before 2021. “If they used three stages, there’s no way they’re going to be getting a man to space any time soon,” Forden says. “If it’s two stages, then maybe they could have suborbital flights fairly soon.” Ongoing tracking of the final stage’s orbit should help to provide an answer, because the speed of its decay due to atmospheric drag will provide clues as to how big it is.
Either way, the launch has heightened concern among those nations that suspect Iran is trying to develop nuclear weapons. A rocket that can put a few dozen kilograms in orbit can also deliver a few hundred kilograms – the mass of a nuclear warhead – as far as western Europe. Iran says its satellite launch was for peaceful purposes.
“It would be very difficult for the spacefaring nations to say that Iran doesn’t have a sovereign right for space launch capabilities,” says Joan Johnson-Freese of the US Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. “But it is also very much an enabler for military capabilities. The dual-use aspect really puts you in a dilemma.”