Iran’s on-off space program has received a boost after a satellite launch was seen to annoy Washington, with Tehran dusting off plans for a crewed mission, perhaps with Moscow’s assistance.
“Ten skilled pilots are currently undergoing difficult and intensive training so that two of them... can be selected for the space launch,” Iranian Ministry of Science, Research and Technology Aerospace Research Institute head Fathollah Omi told the state broadcaster last week.
The plan was to put humans into suborbital space “in less than eight years,” he said.
Photo: AFP / Iranian Students’ News Agency / Borna Ghassemi
“In preliminary talks with Russia’s main space company, we have agreed to cooperate on this important project and we are waiting for their definitive answer,” he said.
Russia has not confirmed the talks, although Iranian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin, who oversees the space program, visited Tehran two years ago to discuss potential collaboration.
Iran’s scientists are also celebrating the fact that two monkeys they fired into space in 2013 have given birth to their first baby.
“Aftab and Fargam were two monkeys sent separately into space and returned alive. Researchers are studying the effect of a space trip on their baby,” Omi said.
Iran’s space program has progressed in fits and starts. It has sent a turtle, mouse and worms into space, and after the successful voyage by the monkeys, then-Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad announced he would like to be first to go up on an Iranian rocket.
However, he was out of office a few months later, and the entire program appeared to have been mothballed earlier this year due to financial constraints.
“It was estimated that putting a man into Earth orbit would cost around US$15 billion to US$20 billion over 15 years. As a result, the budget cannot be allocated for this project,” Iranian Space Organization deputy head, Mohammad Homayoun Sadr, said in May.
That decision seems to have been reversed in the wake of the furor over Iran’s testing of a new satellite launch rocket in July.
The 500km-range rocket — named Simorgh after a bird from Persian legend and with the words “We can do it” inscribed on the side — was launched from the newly inaugurated Imam Khomeini Space Center in Semnan Province.
The US in particular balks at any technological advance that might also benefit Iran’s ballistic missile program, and Washington quickly threatened fresh sanctions.
Omi confirmed the plans for human spaceflights, as well as a new 1,000km-range satellite-rocket, that have followed the “great reaction from the world” to the Simorgh test.
“The Islamic Republic reacts very negatively when it feels it is held back,” said Adnan Tabatabai, an Iran analyst and chief executive of Germany’s CARPO think tank.
“Iran’s nuclear program and particularly its research and development became all the more prestigious and important the more that Iran was under pressure by the West to halt it,” he said.
Iran’s four launches of domestically produced satellites since 2009 have all sparked condemnation from the West.
Iranian Minister of Communications Mohammad Javad Azari Jahromi on Wednesday said that a satellite, named Doosti, was waiting to be launched.
“You send orbital satellite carrier rockets into space and all of a sudden you see they have created uproar about it in the world,” Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said last month. “It is a task which is necessary for every country and which is completely normal and ordinary.”
The controversy appears to have re-energized the space program, which is run by the defense ministry.
“Its leaders like to literally show that the sky is the limit to Iran’s technological progress,” Tabatabai said. “And that safeguarding revolutionary ideals and religious ideology can be reconciled with modernity.”
Through the noise of rushing papers and whirring belts at a print factory in Kyoto, two creators watch their photo essay come to life in broadsheet form — part of an effort to win new audiences in the age of artificial intelligence (AI). Despite the decline of the publishing industry, self-publication and handmade “zine” magazines are growing in popularity in Japan, reflecting the nation’s enduring love of paper in the digital era. While speaking to Agence France-Presse at the plant, his hands black with ink, one of the creators, Kazuma Obara, said: “I think [paper] is a medium that engages all five
‘CROSSING THE LINE’: China’s embassy in Seoul criticized US Forces Korea Commander General Xavier Brunson, asking if his ‘hostile’ remarks were authorized by Washington South Korea and the US are in talks over recent public remarks by the commander of US Forces Korea, Seoul’s presidential office said yesterday, after the comments drew sharp criticism from China. In a recent podcast interview, US Forces Korea Commander General Xavier Brunson described South Korea as “the dagger in the heart of Asia” from China’s east coast, prompting the Chinese embassy in Seoul to say that he had “truly crossed the line.” The interview came amid growing speculation that Washington might seek to expand the role of US Forces Korea in countering the growing regional influence of China, a key
Australian researchers have trained lab-grown brain cells on a silicon computer chip to play the 1990s shooter game Doom and said they are just scratching the surface of what the neurons could be capable of doing. It is the science-fiction work of biotech boffins at Cortical Labs, who researched and developed the technology that harnesses the workings of the brain’s networking system. Each so-called “biological computer” contains about 200,000 living human brain cells, grown from stem cells that were harvested from blood donations. Having mastered the simple computer game Pong, where a paddle is moved up and down to send a ball
France experienced its hottest spring on record, the French weather service said on Tuesday, after an exceptional early heat wave that also broke highs for the season in England and Wales. Meteo-France said the average nationwide temperature over March to May was 13.8°C — about 1.7°C above the norm, and surpassing records set in 2011 and 2020. “The warmest spring since records began in 1900,” it said in a bulletin. All three months were warmer than average, but the onset of an “unprecedented heatwave” late last month pushed the mercury to highs typically seen at the height of the summer. “Our country had never
RSS