Iran watchIran's rocket more advanced than initially thought

Iran launched a satellite into space last week. This is worrisome enough — but we still need to know whether we should be merely very worried, or rather extremely worried. The answer, New Scientist’s David Shiga suggests, depends on whether the home-grown rocket that carried the satellite into space was a weak, old-fashioned rocket pushed to its design limits, or a new, more powerful version developed while those charged with watching for such developments managed not do so. Much depends on the answer to this question — including how likely it is that Iran will achieve its goals of sending humans into space, and balancing Israel’s nuclear capabilities (see 3 February 2009 HS Daily Wire).

Iran satellite — called Omid, or “Hope” — was launched on 2 February. According to Iranian media, it is a 40-centimeter cube weighing 25 kilograms, and is equipped with radio transmitters. Foreign tracking stations have been tracking the satellite’s relatively low orbit. The satellite will eventually — months, perhaps weeks — lose altitude owing to atmospheric drag.

Shiga notes that initially it was thought that the rocket, named Safir-2, was a slightly updated version of relatively feeble missiles that burn ambient-temperature liquid fuel. It was no secret that Iran already had such missiles. Two of these missiles stacked one on top of the other could boost a third, small, solid-fuel rocket that could take a lightweight payload like Omid to orbit.

Now we come to the more worrying part. Evidence has emerge that suggests that the rocket might be more powerful than this. Amateur sky watchers, for example, have reported 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, cobbled-together rocket. Geoffrey Forden of MIT, a specialist in launch capabilities, wrote that he was now examining whether the rocket had just two stages, with a second stage that was much more powerful than anything Iran was known to possess. This would be possible using a cryogenic fuel system involving liquid oxygen. If this is true, this would man that Iran has made an important step toward acquiring the ability 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 anytime 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 it is easy to observe and calculate the drop in the speed of an due to atmospheric drag, and infer the size of the object from these calculations.

Iran’s nuclear weapons ambitions
The the launch has also provided additional proof, if one were needed, that Iran, far from “halting” its nuclear weapons program, as the puzzling Bush administration’s December 2007 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) asserted, was in fact accelerating its march toward the bomb. Shiga correctly observes that 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.

“It would be very difficult for the spacefaring nations to say that Iran doesn’t have a sovereign right for space launch capabilities,” Joan Johnson-Freese of the U.S. Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, told Shiga. “They have a very legitimate reason for wanting to be able to launch their own satellites for both economic and prestige reasons, but it also gives them an additional military capability. The dual-use aspect really puts you in a dilemma.”

Indeed, it does.