Pride in the future: the politics of Iran's space program

Iran’s recent successful launch of a second satellite into orbit has drawn considerable attention around the world. As in the past, Iran’s announcement of the launch of its domestically-built satellite into space received mixed reactions in the West. Some mainstream U.S. media treated the announcement with skepticism and ridicule. “Before you cancel that European vacation or start building a bomb shelter, it’s worth taking Iran’s boasts with a grain of salt”, one commentator wrote. “While Iran has cooked up some indigenous weaponry over the years, its desire to puff out its chest and pronounce immunity from the effects of international sanctions has led to some absurd exaggerations and outright lies”.

To the surprise of such skeptical observers, it was only a matter of hours before independent sources, including some websites associated with NASA, verified the successful launch of Iran’s Rasad satellite by tracking its current position in space. Despite strong motivations for skepticism toward anything positive coming out of Iran, some fair-minded Western observers did not shy away from expressing their independent observations on Iran’s recent satellite launch either. “People wondered after the first time if they just got lucky”, one science analyst observed. “Now that they've put two satellites up there, that indicates perhaps it wasn't a fluke the first time. It demonstrates that their rocket technology is pretty good" .

Apart from Israel which follows even a more hard-line stance than the United States towards Iran’s technological achievements and views Iran’s space program as a cover for the development of long-range ballistic missiles, regional reactions to Iran’s recent satellite launch and its plan for more launches in the near future have largely been mute. This silence should not come as a surprise knowing that major regional countries including Saudi Arabia and Turkey have their own developing space programs and have already had several satellites launched into orbit with the help of foreign countries. In fact, some defense experts consider certain space activities of some of these regional countries even far more mature than Iran’s, even though their activities are not a source of Western concern.

Apart from the fact that some major countries, such as Turkey, do not consider Iran a threat to their national security, they are also less worried about Iran’s space program being a cover for developing long-range ballistic missiles since Iran’s existing missiles can already reach most of their territories. Russia has also refrained from overreacting to Iran’s space activities for fear that Iran might be used as a scapegoat by the West to push ahead with building missile shields in Eastern Europe. In the past, Russia had largely been responsive to U.S. pressure for restraining its cooperation with Iran in space activities in part to have its concerns in other areas met by Western powers.

Puzzle of Iran’s space activities

While some Iranian officials, including President Ahmadinejad, tend to somewhat overstate the nature of Iranian scientific advances, it is a widely-shared belief among independent experts and science analysts that Iran has established itself as the scientific and technological powerhouse in the region. For example, Jane's Intelligence Digest reported in recent years that "Tehran now has established its status as having the most advanced space, missile and nuclear programs in the Muslim Middle East, confirming its technical superiority over its Arab rivals,". Iran has also reportedly recorded the world’s fastest scientific growth over the past 15 years. According to the UK’s Royal Society, Iran’s scientific output rose 18-fold from 1996 to 2008, thus catapulting it to the top of the world in terms of scientific growth rate.

Regardless of how the Western governments and media would react to Iran’s technological achievements, it may be puzzling why Iran is undertaking large investments in such advanced technological fields. This question is particularly interesting knowing that Iran has neglected investments in other crucial sectors such as oil refineries over the last three decades. Such a neglect has cost Iran well over one hundred billion dollars of hard-earned foreign exchange through the import of gasoline over this period while exposing it to the threat of gasoline embargo by its sworn adversaries and forcing it to shift the operation of its petrochemical factories to produce gasoline in recent years in order to fend off such threats.

The dominant narrative among Western politicians and in mainstream Western media is that Iran uses its satellite launches as a cover to develop long-range ballistic missile technology. The main reason for this view is that the same technology used to launch satellites into space can also with some modifications deliver conventional and non-conventional warheads over a long distance to hit targets, for example, in Western Europe or even in the United States.

This line of argument suffers from two main problems. First, Iran is already subject to harsh economic sanctions imposed by Western powers and would not need the luxury of a cover to develop long-range ballistic missile technology. Even though long-range ballistic missiles are largely associated with nuclear warheads, theoretically speaking nothing prevents Iran from the perspective of international law from developing long-range ballistic missiles if they are only capable of delivering conventional warheads. Iran could thus openly work on the development of such technology while ignoring Western accusations.