New York Times: Iran test-fired a new rocket capable of carrying a satellite into orbit, the Iranian state news media reported Sunday. Western experts said the launching represented a potentially significant if much-delayed step in Iran’s efforts to join the international space club.
The New York Times
By WILLIAM J. BROAD
Published: August 17, 2008
Iran test-fired a new rocket capable of carrying a satellite into orbit, the Iranian state news media reported Sunday. Western experts said the launching represented a potentially significant if much-delayed step in Iran’s efforts to join the international space club.
The report of the test flight comes amid growing Western nervousness about Iran’s nuclear program and concerns that it could one day use its missile expertise to threaten enemies with annihilation by means of atomic warheads.
On Sunday, Iranian television broadcast images of the night rocket launching and said the satellite had been fired into orbit. But officials later said that only the rocket had been launched. The White House said Iran’s rocket announcement was “troubling,” calling it part of a pattern of Iranian activity to build a nuclear program and the means to potentially launch a weapon.
“The Iranian development and testing of rockets is troubling and raises further questions about their intentions,” a White House spokesman, Gordon D. Johndroe, said Sunday.
Rocket scientists agree that the same technology that puts satellites into orbit can deliver warheads.
An administration official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of security concerns, said that the best American information indicated that the Iranian effort had failed, and that the rocket or the dummy satellite or both had broken up.
Charles P. Vick, an expert on Iranian rockets at GlobalSecurity.org, a research group in Alexandria, Va., called the weekend test flight “a precursor to the satellite launch.” He said the satellite’s launching had been repeatedly delayed and might occur in the next few weeks or months.
“This test launching is several months behind the June expectation,” he added in an interview, saying the Iranians had suffered many delays because of design flaws and hardware failures.
Mr. Vick said the launching nonetheless in theory represented a significant step because it appeared to be Iran’s first firing of a rocket with more than one stage. The rocket was identified by state news media as the Safir-e Omid, or Ambassador of Peace, and was said to have fired two stages. Mr. Vick said the first stage consisted of a Shahab, a standard rocket in Iran’s arsenal, topped by a liquid-fueled second stage and possibly a small solid-fueled third stage.
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was at Iran’s space center and made the countdown to the launching, state television reported. “The president congratulated the Iranian nation on the great achievement,” it said. The rocket beamed flight data back to ground control, Reza Taghipoor, the director of Iran’s space agency, told state television.
Iran has long held the goal of developing a space program.
In 2005, it launched its first commercial satellite on a Russian rocket in a project with Moscow, a main partner in transferring space technology to Iran.
The spacecraft was quite small by world standards — a microsatellite of a few hundred pounds. It orbited Earth once every 99 minutes and reportedly had a camera for peering down on large swaths of land.
Iran says it wants to put its own satellites into orbit to monitor natural disasters in the earthquake-prone nation and improve its telecommunications. Iranian officials also point to the use of satellites by the United States to monitor Afghanistan and Iraq and say they need similar abilities for their security.
Iran hopes to launch four more satellites by 2010, the government has said. Western experts consider that goal ambitious and probably quite hard to achieve.
Steven Lee Myers contributed reporting from Waco, Tex., and Thom Shanker from Washington.
