Iranian satellite launch successful
Revolutionary Guard responsible
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — The United States has quietly acknowledged that Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guard successfully put an imaging satellite into orbit this week in a launch that resembled others previously criticized by Washington as helping Tehran’s ballistic missile program.
The US military has not responded to repeated requests for comment from the Associated Press since Iran announced the launch of the Noor-3 satellite on Wednesday, the latest successful launch by the Revolutionary Guard after Iran’s civilian space program faced a series of failed launches in recent years.
Early Friday, however, data published by the website spacetrack.org listed a launch Wednesday by Iran that put the Noor-3 satellite into orbit.
It put the satellite at over 280 miles above the Earth’s surface, which corresponds to Iranian state media reports regarding the launch. It also identified the rocket carrying the satellite as a Qased, a three-stage rocket fueled by both liquid and solid fuels first launched by the Guard in 2020 when it unveiled its upto-then-secret space program.
Authorities released a video of a rocket taking off from a mobile launcher without saying where it occurred. Details in the video earlier analyzed by the Associated Press corresponded with a Guard base near Shahrud, about 205 miles northeast of the capital, Tehran. The base is in Semnan province, which hosts the Imam Khomeini Spaceport from which Iran’s civilian space program operates.
Speaking Thursday night to Iranian state television, Guard space commander General Ali Jafarabadi described the Noor-3 satellite as having “image accuracy that is two and a half times that of the Noor-2 satellite.” Noor-2, launched in March 2022, remains in orbit. Noor-1, launched in 2020, fell back to Earth last year.
Jafarabadi said Noor-3 has thrusters for the first time that allow it to maneuver in orbit. He also offered a wider description of Iran’s hopes for its satellite program, including potentially controlling drones. That could raise further concerns for the West and Ukraine, which Russia has bombarded with Iranian-made bombcarrying drones for over a year.
“If you look at the recent wars in the world, you will see that success on the battlefield is very dependent on the use of satellite technologies,” Jafarabadi said. “Now the armed forces in all the progressive countries are trying to make all their equipment remote control, it means that to make it steerable, when a vessel or any other equipment takes a long distance from us, it is no longer possible to see and guide it, except through satellite.”
The image-taking capabilities of the Noor-3 remain unclear. International sanctions on Iran have locked it out of accessing commercially available imagery, forcing it to develop its own homegrown satellites. The head of the US Space Command dismissed the Noor-1 as a “tumbling webcam in space” that would not provide vital intelligence.
The United States says Iran’s satellite launches defy a UN Security Council resolution and has called on Tehran to undertake no activity involving ballistic missiles capable of delivering nuclear weapons.
The US intelligence community’s 2023 worldwide threat assessment says the development of satellite launch vehicles “shortens the timeline” for Iran to develop an intercontinental ballistic missile because it uses similar technology.
“Iran’s continued advancement of its ballistic missile capabilities poses a serious threat to regional and international security and remains a significant nonproliferation concern,” US State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said Thursday.