The Iranian space program is a confusion of satellite names and claims. The real news this year was that President Ahmadi-nejad revealed in what must have been a slip of the tongue that Iran’s first effort to launch a satellite had failed.
Ahmadi-nejad appeared Monday with four satellites he said were being readied for launch, just as he appeared 52 weeks ago with three satellites he said would be launched this year. Ahmadi-nejad said nothing about the missing satellites.
Last year, Iran showed off the Tolu (Sunrise), the Mesbah-2 (Lantern-2) and the Navid-e Elm o Sanat (Herald of Science and Industry). The last was back in this year’s line up, but the other two went unmentioned
The new satellites unveiled this year are the Rasad (Observer), Fajr (Dawn) and Zafar (Victory). Ahmadi-nejad said they would be orbited by Now Ruz 2012.
Ahmadi-nejad lauded Iranian scientists for their work on satellites as he denigrated foreign satellite programs.
He said, “Those countries that have launched satellites had to make at least nine attempts before they were successful. How many times did it take for Iran to be successful? I guess it was on the second attempt. It took Iran two attempts to orbit it successfully. What is the distance between nine and two?”
But the Islamic Republic has never said it failed in a first attempt to launch a satellite. This appeared to be a slip of the tongue on Ahmadi-nejad’s part. There have been suspicions and indications of a failed satellite launch, but the regime has not—until now—acknowledged a failure.
Ahmadi-nejad’s history lesson was also pure mythology. It isn’t known where he got the idea that all other countries that have launched satellites have had a minimum of eight failures before achieving success.
The Soviet Union claimed it put the world’s first satellite into orbit October 4, 1957, on its first attempt. The United States had a very public failure trying to launch its first satellite, Vanguard, on December 6, 1957. The Vanguard rocket blew up spectacularly on the launch pad. The next launch effort was made with the Explorer 1 satellite January 31, 1958, and it succeeded.
But no one in the media corrected Ahmadi-nejad or pointed out that his history lesson was non-factual.
Six other countries have orbited satellites: China, Japan, France, Israel, India and Britain. It could not immediately be determined how many failures any of them had before successfully orbiting a satellite.
Iranian state television later broadcast a news report on the space program. It interviewed an official who said Iran would “soon” send a monkey up aboard a sounding rocket. The monkey will not go into orbit. A sounding rocket simply goes straight up and then drops back down to earth. The official said the monkey would be fired to an altitude of 120 kilometers (75 miles) and than fall gently back to earth under parachutes.
Iran has fired two previous sounding rockets. The first was empty; state television showed film of it intact after landing. The second carried some insects and small animals; state television showed photos of the animals before launch, but showed nothing of any landing, indicating that the rocket likely failed to land intact.
The television program Monday also showed the Tolu satellite that had been unveiled last year but disappeared from this year’s public lineup. The official said the Tolu would be launched in the coming Persian year. But he declined to answer a question of the Tolu’s mission.
The official, who was not named, said that whenever Iran puts a satellite into orbit, “it sends a message to them [apparently referring to Iran’s enemies] and tells them that this is the space territory of the Islamic Republic—and this message breaks their back.”
He appeared unaware that space has been declared international and that no country may claim any “space territory.”
The Iranian media says Iran does not have any satellites in orbit now, given that the Omid fell to earth after just 80 days in orbit. But in October 2005, Russian lofted a Russian-made satellite bought by Iran and called Sina. According to n2yo, the satellite tracking service on the Internet, Sina is still orbiting the earth after more than four years. But Iran does not talk about it for some reason.
Last week, the government announced that it has opened three ground stations for receiving communications and photos from its soon-to-be-launched satellites. But Iran announced the set-up of such a ground station for Sina five years ago and released a few photos Sina had taken of the earth. No one said what has happened to that ground station.