Iran likely conducted a failed launch of a satellite-carrying rocket in the past few days and now appears to be preparing to try again, the country’s latest effort to advance its space program amid tensions with the West over its tattered nuclear deal.
Satellite images, a US official and a rocket expert all confirmed the failed launch this month at the Imam Khomeini Spaceport in Iran’s Semnan Province.
The attempt comes as Iran’s space program has suffered a series of high-profile losses, while its paramilitary Revolutionary Guard runs its own parallel program that launched a satellite into orbit last year.
Photo: AP
As with other failed launches, Iranian state media did not acknowledge that it took place.
Iran’s mission to the UN did not immediately respond to a request for comment yesterday.
Satellite photographs from Planet Labs Inc and Maxar Technologies show preparations at the spaceport on June 6.
Those images include what appears to be fuel tanks alongside a massive white gantry that houses a rocket, while scientists fuel it and prepare for launch.
Before the launch, workers tow the gantry away to expose the rocket.
The number of fuel tanks, based on their size, appear to have been enough to fill the first and second stages of an Iranian Simorgh rocket, said Jeffrey Lewis, an expert at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies in Vermont.
The Simorgh is a rocket that carries satellites that has been launched from that same area of the spaceport, Lewis said.
Later satellite images on Thursday last week showed a decrease in activity at the site.
Lewis said that analysts believe Iran launched the rocket at some point in that window.
“Nothing had blown up. There wasn’t a giant stain — like they had dumped the fuel — and the vehicles had kind of just moved around,” he said.
“The overall level of activity at the site was much lower. So to our mind, that looked like a launch,” he said.
CNN, which first reported on the failed launch, quoted Pentagon spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Uriah Orland as saying that “US Space Command is aware of the Iranian rocket launch failure which occurred early June 12.”
Orland did not elaborate.
The Pentagon and the US Space Command did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
It was not immediately clear why Iran would have picked June 12 for a launch, as Tehran typically schedules such launches for national commemorations.
However, it did come in the run-up to Iran’s presidential election last week, in which the Islamic Republic had hoped to boost turnout.
On Sunday, a new satellite image from Planet Labs showed renewed activity at the site.
The image shows a mobile platform previously used to secure a Simorgh rocket at the gantry, a support vehicle seen at previous launches and a line of containers of fuel not seen before.
Lewis said that the equipment suggests another launch is imminent.
Separately, US authorities seized a range of Iran’s state-linked news Web site domains that they accused of spreading disinformation, the US Department of Justice said on Tuesday.
The department said that 33 of the seized Web sites were used by the Iranian Islamic Radio and Television Union, which was singled out by the US government in October last year for what officials described as efforts to spread disinformation and sow discord among American voters ahead of last year’s presidential election.
Washington has said that three other seized Web sites were operated by the Iraqi Shiite paramilitary group, Kataib Hezbollah, which more than a decade ago was designated a foreign terrorist organization.
Kataib Hezbollah is separate from the Lebanese militant Hezbollah group, news sites of which remained operational.
The Web site domains are owned by US companies, but despite the sanctions, neither the union nor the militants obtained the required licenses from the US government before using the domain names, the department said.
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