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.”
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