The Mesbah satellite was ordered from Carlo Gavazzi Space SpA in February 2003 for $10 million. Iran always said it was a joint Italian-Iranian design, but the corporation said the satellite was simply a company design with an Iranian name.
In 2005, Russia announced it would launch the Italian-made Mesbah and the Russian-made Sina satellites atop the same rocket. Sina was launched that September and became Iran’s first orbital satellite. But Mesbah was not on that rocket. Russian officials said the Mesbah had not been delivered in time.
It now appears it was never delivered—period.
Hamid Fazeli, the head of Iran’s Space Agency, was quoted last week as saying, “Iran now has rockets capable of launching the Mesbah-1. But, unfortunately, Italy is using various pretexts such as [UN] resolutions and sanctions for not giving us the satellite.”
Fazeli said Iran has now “started” talks with Italy to get its hands on the satellite. He didn’t say why nothing had been done in the previous 5 1/2 years.
Agence France Presse said some specialized websites had reported that Italy has suspended the licenses required to export to Iran materials covered by UN sanctions. But it isn’t clear that satellites are covered by sanctions, which are designed to block Iranian work on nuclear projects and missile development. Furthermore, there were no UN sanctions of any kind in 2005 when the Mesbah was supposedly finished.
Iran has since developed its own satellite named Mesbah-2, to distinguish it from the cube-shaped Italian-made Mesbah-1.
Mesbah-1 weighs 75 kilograms, which was too heavy and too large to be launched on the satellite launcher Iran has used to date. But Iran now says it has a new model satellite launcher that can handle the Mesbah-1.