Satellite photos show Iran has built a new rocket-launching center near the city of Shahrud. That gives Iran three such centers. (The United States has only two, one on each coast.) Iran had previously announced it was building a satellite launch center, but didn’t name a location. However, Jane’s said it believes the Shahrud center is for testing military ballistic missiles rather than satellite launchers because the photos show no storage for liquid fuel, which is used in Iran’s space program. Many of Iran’s military rockets use solid fuel. The launch site is near the Turkmenistan border so that the rockets can travel almost 900 miles (1,500 kilometers) and still stay within Iranian territory, preventing the United States from gathering up wreckage from test flights into the ocean.
