failed efforts to have its Zohreh communications satellite system built abroad, announced Tuesday that it will build the satellite itself.
As recently as May, officials said Iran was negotiating with an unnamed foreign partner. Now that has all changed, without explanation.
State television quoted Mohammad Mardani, technology director of the Iran Aerospace Organization, as saying the government had decided to exclude all foreigners from any role in the Zohreh satellite system, plans for which date back a third of a century.
He said the contract for the satellite had now been signed with a consortium of domestic firms. None of them was named.
It is very likely that the changed environment resulting from sanctions has led the regime to give up on a foreign partner. Russia said in July 2009 that it would no longer launch any Iranian satellites.
A system of six satellites named Zohreh (Venus) has been envisioned since the 1970s to carry Iran’s radio, television and telephone signals.
Zohreh is a very different project from the small satellites Iran has been working on in recent years. It would be huge in size, requiring a much larger rocket to put it in orbit than anything Iran now has. It would also have to be put in geosynchronous orbit about 42,000 kilometers about the earth, an entirely different story from Iran’s Omid satellite, the only satellite Iran has so far launched, which circled the earth 85 days last year with a high point of just 381 kilometers
The Zohreh system was outlined and satellite orbits reserved in 1978 before the revolution. But the revolutionaries looked askance at the project as another of the Shah’s hare-brained “prestige” projects and it was canceled. Like the Tehran Metro, the superhighway to the Caspian, the nuclear power program and many other much-maligned royal projects, however, it was revived in the 1980s.
President Rafsanjani started speaking annually of how the Zohreh satellite would be launched “this year” shortly after he took office in 1989. France, Russia, China and India all were invited to bid on building and launching Zohreh. Finally, in 2001 a contract was signed with a Russian firm, Uoya Export. That contract came under immediate criticism because Uoya doesn’t make satellites and was just a middleman. Nothing came of the Russian contract and it was canceled early in 2003 amid great embarrassment.
Late in 2003, Masud Moqqadas, a member of the board of the Iran Communications Company, told the daily Iran that negotiations with the French began even before the Russian contract had been canceled.
The project outlined by Moqqadas was considerably different from what was talked of before. Moqqadas said Iran was negotiating with France, Greece and South Africa to form a Zohreh corporation with Iran holding 49 percent.
France would build and launch the satellite. But he did not say what role Greece and South Africa would have. It wasn’t clear if they would be using part of the satellite system or were to be mere investors.
Moqqadas said the documents needed to incorporate the Zohreh firm had been drafted and the four countries would sign the documents by October 2003. That was the last heard of that version of the Zohreh program.
Then in January 2005, Iran and Russia announced the signing of a $132 million contract under which Russia would build and launch Zohreh. Roskomos, the Russian space agency, said French and German firms would participate in equipping Zohreh. A few months later, Alcatel of France was identified as being involved. In late 2005, Iran said Zohreh would be launched by April 2008.
In December 2006, Roskomos officials said the launch would not come before 2009 at the earliest. It said problems with European subcontractors were causing delays. In 2006, Alcatel merged with Lucent of the United States, which most likely took Alcatel out of project entirely.
In February 2008, the Majlis approved a $250 million project for the state broadcaster to own its own satellite for radio and television transmissions. With telephone calls shifting largely to cellphones, and state broadcasting going its own way for radio and television signals, the need for Zohreh seemed to dry up. With Russia unwilling to launch Iranian satellites for Iran after July 2009, Zohreh seemed dead.
And, indeed, news reports about Zohreh died—until May when a vice president of the Iranian Aerospace Organization, Mehdi Musavi-Badjani, said there were intense negotiations for a contract with an unnamed foreign partner—implying that Russia was out of the picture.
Then last week, the Aerospace Organization dismissed talk of foreign partners and revived Zohreh as an all-Iranian project, at least in name.
Meanwhile, no more has been heard about the state broadcaster’s plans for its own satellite.
