June 25, 2021
The Washington Post has reported that Russia is set to sell Iran a satellite that will vastly improve its spying capabilities, but Russian President Vladimir Putin called that report “garbage.”
Tehran last year lofted its first military spying satellite, but the United States has said the satellite is tumbling head-over-heels and as such is useless. The purchase of a Russian spy satellite could mean Iran’s military has given up hopes of quickly acquiring its own, homegrown spy satellite.
Moscow is preparing to sell Iran a Kanopus-V satellite with a high-resolution camera, The Washington Post reported June 10. But Putin said, “It’s all fake news…. It’s all gibberish and garbage.”
Kanopus would allow the Islamic Republic to monitor its adversaries across the Middle East, the newspaper said, citing current and former US and Middle Eastern officials.
The officials said the launch of the satellite could happen within months. Russia will launch the satellite, it said, suggesting that Iran may have given up on its own satellite launching rockets. However, Kanopus weighs in at 450 kilograms, which is nine times heavier than any previous satellite lofted by Iran and too heavy to be carried aboard an Iranian rocket.
The Post said the satellite carries a camera with a resolution of 1.2 meters (four feet), meaning it can pick out an object of that size. That is far from the capability of US spy satellites, which reportedly have a resolution of five centimeters (two inches). And it is far from the capability of commercial satellites; the best commercial images that US law allows to be marketed is 25 centimeters (10 inches) and the US Central Command recently revealed that Iran was buying commercial satellite images to target US forces at Iraq’s Al-Ayn Air Base a year ago. It said the US knew just what images Iran bought and thus was able to move its airplanes before Iran fired missiles at the base.
Russians have helped train ground crews who would operate the satellite from a new site near Karaj, the Post reported. Iran already has a civilian space communications center in Semnan, which has nothing to do since none of the satellites orbited by Iran are still in orbit. But the Iranian military may not want to share space with the civilian center.
The deal could allow Tehran greater monitoring of the Persian Gulf, Israeli bases and America’s troop presence in Iraq.
But in an interview with VOA, Gen. Kenneth McKenzie, commander-in-chief of the US Central Command, said he really didn’t care if Iran got the Kanopus-V, since it would do little to help with Iranian targeting. “You really can’t do much with it,” he said. “It would probably allow them to see something the size of a school bus, which is not going to be particularly concerning to us…. If that’s the way they want to spend their money, they should go ahead.”
Back in 2015, Iran’s PressTV reported that Iran had signed an agreement allowing Iran to buy a Russian “remote-sensing system” that is, a camera-equipped satellite. The Post report was the first suggestion that Iran was actually using the five-year-old agreement.
But in an interview with NBC News, Putin disparaged the Post report.
“Look, why are we talking about problems that don’t exist? There is no subject for a discussion. Somebody has invented something, has made something up. Maybe this is just a bogus story so as to limit any kind of military and technical cooperation with Iran.
“I will say once again this is just some fake information that I have no knowledge about. For the first time I’m hearing about this information from you. I we don’t have this kind of intentions. And I’m not even sure that Iran is even able to accommodate this kind of technology.
“This is a separate subject, a very high-tech subject. We don’t rule out cooperation with many world nations in space. But probably everybody knows very well our position in terms that we are categorically against space militarization all together.
“We believe that space should be free from any and all kinds of weapons located in near-Earth orbits. We don’t have this kind of plan or any plans, especially concerning the transfer of technology of the level that you have just described.”
