About a dozen worms joined a rat and two turtles in a research capsule aboard a Kavoshgar-3 satellite-carrying rocket launched this morning as part of an ambitious Iranian space programme that has worried Western experts who fear the same technology could be used to deliver atomic warheads.
France reacted to the rocket launch with "great concern". A Foreign Ministry spokesman said: "This announcement can only reinforce the concerns of the international community as Iran in parallel develops a nuclear programme that has no identifiable civil aims."
Paradoxically, the launch came only a few hours after Mr Ahmadinejad suggested that Iran would be willing to go back to a UN-brokered deal it rejected last year and send its low-enriched uranium for processing abroad. The proposal was given a cautious welcome in Western capitals.
Iranian state television showed footage of the Kavoshgar rocket being fired from a desert launchpad. A few minutes later the grainy images showed the capsule detaching from the rocket and spinning off into orbit – although there were no details of its fate after that. The station reported that the rocket had "the ability to send back empirical data".
State television also carried pictures of Mr Ahmadinejad unveiling another home-built rocket dubbed the Simorgh (phoenix). The milk-bottle shaped rocket, emblazoned in blue with the words "Satellite Carrier Simorgh", is equipped to carry a 100kg (220lb) satellite 500km (310 miles) into orbit.
At the ceremony, at which he also unveiled three home-built satellites, Mr Ahmadinejad hailed the progress Iran was making in its space programme and said that it was only through science that it could "break the global domineering system".
"It is a great job that living organisms can be sent into space – we do experiments on them and they return to Earth," the President said. "We are going to send a satellite 500km up.
"The next steps are 700km and 1,000km. Everyone knows that reaching the 1,000km orbit allows you to reach all orbits.
"This was a huge breakthrough... and we hope we can send our own astronauts into space soon."
Iran launched its first home-built satellite, Omid (hope), in February last year to coincide with the 30th anniversary of the Islamic revolution. The previous year it launched two rockets – Kavoshgar (Explorer) and Kavoshgar 2, although neither was carrying any payload.
Tehran has said that it wants to put satellites into orbit to monitor natural disasters in the earthquake-prone nation and improve its telecommunications, but it is already locked in a stand-off with the West over its nuclear programme – which it insists is for the generation of electricity – and its technological advances have set alarm bells ringing.
Source : Times Online
