New satellite images, expert suggest Iran space launch coming
- Satellite images appear to show new activity at Iran’s Imam Khomeini Spaceport
- Possible space launch comes amid negotiations to try to revive Iran nuclear pact
The likely blast-off at Iran’s Imam Khomeini Spaceport comes as Iranian state media has offered a list of upcoming planned satellite launches in the works for the Islamic Republic’s civilian space programme, which has been beset by a series of failed launches. Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guard runs its own parallel programme that successfully put a satellite into orbit last year.
Conducting a launch amid the Vienna talks fits the hardline posture struck by Tehran’s negotiators, who already described six previous rounds of diplomacy as a “draft”, exasperating Western nations. Germany’s new foreign minister has gone as far as to warn that “time is running out for us at this point”.
But all this fits into a renewed focus on space by Iran’s hardline President Ebrahim Raisi, said Jeffrey Lewis, an expert at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies who studies Tehran’s programme.
With Iran’s former president Hassan Rowhani who shepherded the nuclear deal out of office, concerns about alienating the talks with launches that the US asserts aids Tehran’s ballistic missile programme likely have faded.
“They’re not walking on eggshells,” Lewis said. “I think Raisi’s people have a new balance in mind.”