Abii
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Nobody denies Iran's achievement in Rocket Technology here, But sending sending decent normal sattelites in to space (around 250-350 kg) is still far away for iran. Dont get so existed yet, These are mere small and inferior sattelits, as you can see the life span is only 1,5 year.
The plan is to keep sending heavier and heavier sats by bringing in new generation of SLVs every few years. A new launch base is being built for sending a 1 ton sat (scheduled for around 2020). They're now behind schedule. Our Simorgh SLV was supposed to be out last year, but it will be out this year. Also, by 2016 we should be able to send sats into orbits of up to 36,000 KM.
Correct me people, I'm just saying this without checking, but the weight of the sat doesn't have anything to do with how long it stays up. It's how high of an orbit you send it to.
You can see a complete list of sats waiting to be launched here.
If I had to guess, I would say our space program would get a 'lift off' (see what I did there? lol) with additional funding. We like to follow the Russian model of building everything cheap and dirty. This is one area where they shouldn't do this. We need to have some juicy sats up there by 2020. I think they're so scared of having a failed launch (with all the attention Iran gets) that they're delaying new SLVs as long as possible. The North Korean failed rocket had similar specs to the new Simorgh SLV so that should teach them a thing or two as well.
You can't call them inferior satellites, it's not because of the weight that the life span is only 1.5 years, but it's because the satellite will be injected into the LEO. The LEO is more polluted with objects orbiting around the earth that could be destructive for the satellite but as you go higher and higher from the earth like in GEO there would be much less objects orbiting the earth so the satellite would have a higher life span. Iran could advance easily if it wants, but Iran must be very cautious because any GEO launch by Iran would put Iran under severe embargoes because the west will use it as a pretext that Iran is after ICBM technology to hit them.
damn you beat me lol