Iran launches satellite that could boost missiles amid growing tensions

JERUSALEM — Iran said Saturday it had conducted a successful satellite launch into its highest orbit yet, the latest for a program the West fears improves Tehran’s ballistic missiles.

The announcement comes as heightened tensions grip the wider Middle East over Israel’s war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip and just days after Iran and Pakistan engaged in tit-for-tat airstrikes in each others’ countries.

Meanwhile Saturday, the U.S. conducted new strikes on Yemen’s Houthi rebels, who have been targeting shipping in the Red Sea over the war, and Iranian-backed militias in Iraq struck a base housing U.S. troops, wounding several personnel.

The Iranian Soraya satellite was placed in an orbit at some 460 miles above the Earth’s surface with its three-stage Qaem 100 rocket, the state-run IRNA news agency said. It did not immediately acknowledge what the satellite did, though telecommunications minister Isa Zarepour described the launch as having a 110-pound payload.

The launch was part of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards’ space program alongside Iran’s civilian space program, the report said.

Footage released by Iranian media showed the rocket blast off from a mobile launcher, a religious verse referring to Shiite Islam’s 12th hidden imam written on its side.

An Associated Press analysis of the footage suggested the launch happened at the Guard’s launch pad on the outskirts of the city of Shahroud, some 215 miles east of the capital, Tehran. Iran’s three latest successful satellite launches have all happened at the site.

There was no independent confirmation Iran had successfully put the satellite in orbit. The U.S. military and the State Department did not respond to a request for comment.

The United States has previously said Iran’s satellite launches defy a U.N. Security Council resolution and called on Tehran to undertake no activity involving ballistic missiles capable of delivering nuclear weapons. U.N. sanctions related to Iran’s ballistic missile program expired last October.

Under Iran’s relatively moderate former President Hassan Rouhani, the Islamic Republic slowed its space program for fear of raising tensions with the West. Hard-line President Ebrahim Raisi, a protégé of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei who came to power in 2021, has pushed the program forward.