MANAMA, Bahrain — Iran mentioned Friday it carried out a profitable area launch, the newest for its program the West alleges improves Tehran’s ballistic missile program.
Iran carried out the launch utilizing its Simorgh program, a satellite-carrying rocket that had had a collection of failed launches, at Iran’s Imam Khomeini Spaceport in rural Semnan province. That is the positioning of Iran’s civilian area program.
The Simorgh carried what Iran described as an “orbital propulsion system,” in addition to two analysis methods to a 400-kilometer (250-mile) orbit above the Earth. A system that would change the orbit of a spacecraft would permit Iran to geo-synchronize the orbits of its satellites. Tehran has lengthy sought that potential.
Iran additionally put the payload of the Simorgh at 300 kilograms (660 kilos), heavier than its earlier profitable launches.
There was no fast unbiased affirmation the launch was profitable. The U.S. navy didn’t instantly reply to a request for remark.
The announcement comes as heightened tensions grip the broader Center East over Israel’s continued warfare on Hamas within the Gaza Strip and as an uneasy ceasefire holds in Lebanon.
The US has beforehand mentioned Iran’s satellite tv for pc launches defy a U.N. Safety Council decision and referred to as on Tehran to undertake no exercise involving ballistic missiles able to delivering nuclear weapons. U.N. sanctions associated to Iran’s ballistic missile program expired in October 2023.
“Iran’s work on space-launch automobiles — together with its Simorgh — most likely would shorten the timeline to provide an intercontinental ballistic missile, if it determined to develop one, as a result of the methods use related applied sciences,” a U.S. intelligence group report launched in July mentioned.
Underneath Iran’s comparatively average former President Hassan Rouhani, the Islamic Republic slowed its area program for concern of elevating tensions with the West. The late hard-line President Ebrahim Raisi, a protégé of Supreme Chief Ayatollah Ali Khamenei who got here to energy in 2021, pushed this system ahead. Raisi died in a helicopter crash in Could.
Iran’s reformist President Masoud Pezeshkian, who has been signaling he desires to barter with the West over sanctions, has but to supply technique relating to Iran’s ambitions in area. The Simorgh launch represented the primary for his administration from the nation’s civil area program. Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guard carried out a profitable launch in its parallel program in September.
Intercontinental ballistic missiles can be utilized to ship nuclear weapons. Iran is now producing uranium near weapons-grade ranges after the collapse of its nuclear cope with world powers. Tehran has sufficient enriched uranium for “a number of” nuclear weapons, if it chooses to provide them, the top of the Worldwide Atomic Vitality Company repeatedly has warned.
Iran has at all times denied searching for nuclear weapons and says its area program, like its nuclear actions, is for purely civilian functions. Nevertheless, U.S. intelligence companies and the IAEA say Iran had an organized navy nuclear program up till 2003.
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Related Press author Nasser Karimi in Tehran, Iran, contributed to this report.
