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Shiplord Kirel: From behind wingnut lines2/03/2009 3:14:09 am PST

This story is in spin-off links, but I thought it was important enought to bring here.

Iran puts first satellite in Orbit: agencies

Is this the “Sputnik from Hell?” That depends on what the media choose to make of it. Has Iran made a giant leap toward great power status, or have they pulled off a costly and irrelevant stunt by recycling ancient technology?

Iranian space program, background at Encyclopedia Astronautica

The rocket was named as “Safir” in today’s announcement but is almost certainly the same as the “Shahab SLV” reported last year. This is a derivative of the North Korean No Dong IRBM, which is part of a huge family of rockets derived from the infamous “Scud” (R-17) which traces its own ancestry all the way back to the German V-2 of World War 2.
Fwiw, the first American satellite, Explorer, was launched just over 50 years ago on an American development of the V-2, the Jupiter C (aka Redstone MRBM)), and American Moon rockets were designed by none other than the V-2’s creator, Wernher von Braun.

It would seem to be axiomatic that any rocket powerful enough to put a satellite into orbit around the Earth could also launch a warhead to the other side of the Earth, the burnout velocity being lower for the latter.
This is not really the case, however, especially for a relatively new program like Iran’s.
Nuclear warheads have a certain minimum mass and a first generation weapon is likely to be quite heavy (the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs weighed on the order of 5 tons.) A satellite can be a great deal smaller. The aforementioned Explorer of 1958 weighed just 31 pounds and its ill-fated predecessor, Vanguard, was the size of a grapefruit and weighed just 3 pounds. With all the miniaturization of electronics since, today’s Iranian satellite might be a glorified cellphone for all we know.