Iran’s Raisi Says Successful Satellite Launch Shows Futility of ‘Threats and Sanctions’

The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) launched the third of its Noor (‘Light’) series satellites into orbit on Wednesday aboard a Qased (‘Messenger’) carrier rocket. The satellite will engage in intelligence collection, according to the IRGC.

The launch of Iran’s latest generation satellite into orbit is a “national success,” and an event proving the futility of sanctions against the Islamic Republic, President Ebrahim Raisi has said.

“The production and placing of the Iranian Nour-3 satellite into an orbit of 450 km from Earth, using the Iranian satellite carrier Qased, once again showed that threats and sanctions have no impact on the determination of our young scientists for the progress and excellence of Islamic Iran,” Raisi said in a congratulatory message.

“I would like to congratulate all people, the efforts of the country’s space industry, the Iranian Space Organization and especially the space experts of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and call on the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology and the Iranian Space Organization to pave the way for the rapid growth of the space industry more than in the past,” Raisi added.

The IRGC confirmed Wednesday that the Nour-3 (also spelled Noor-3) will engage in the collection of military intelligence, and said the country plans to launch two additional spacecraft before the Iranian New Year in March 2024 to build “a constellation of satellites in orbit.”

The Nour series of intelligence satellites has consistently proven its worth. In 2020 and 2022, Iran released detailed images of US bases in the Persian Gulf using the Nour-1 and Nour-2. The Nour-1 happened to send back its data just weeks after a senior Pentagon official derided it as a mere “tumbling webcam in space” that wouldn’t be able to provide any usable intelligence.

Iran is one of less than a dozen nations in the world with a mature, completely indigenous space program – divided between civilian and military endeavors, with the latter led by the IRGC. The country launched its first satellite in 2009, becoming the first nation in the Muslim World to do so, and started launching and retrieving animals, including turtles, rodents and monkeys in the decade that followed.

The Islamic Republic has also engaged in extensive space cooperation with Russia. Last year, a Russian carrier rocket helped launched the Khayyam, a 600 kg civilian remote sensing satellite. The satellite, which became fully operational in July, is named after the polymath Omar Khayyam, one of the great astronomers of Ancient Persia.

Iran has enjoyed success with its domestic space program despite being heavily sanctioned for many decades, with the US and its allies currently designating over 4,600 Iranian officials, companies, and government entities, and promoting secondary restrictions designed to sap the country’s ability to cooperate with the outside world, obtain technologies, financing, etc. The US Treasury slapped its latest sanctions on the Islamic Republic earlier this month, seemingly in coordination with a prisoner swap deal that allowed Tehran to get back some $6 billion in frozen Iranian government assets.