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Keiji Maeda
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Iran to send monkey into space
Iran plans to send a live monkey into space in the summer, the country's top space official has said.
Sam, the Rhesus monkey, after his ride in the Little Joe - 2 (LJ - 2) spacecraft in 1961 Photo: REX FEATURES
12:51PM BST 16 Jun 2011
In February, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad unveiled a space capsule designed to carry a live monkey into space, along with four new prototypes of home-built satellites the country hopes to launch before March 2012.
"The Kavoshgar-5 rocket will be launched during the month of Mordad (July 23 to August 23) with a 285-kilogram capsule carrying a monkey to an altitude of 120 kilometres (74 miles)," said Hamid Fazeli, head of Iran's Space Organisation.
At the time, Mr Fazeli touted the launch of a large animal into space as the first step towards sending a man into space, which Tehran says is scheduled for 2020.
Iran sent small animals into space – a rat, turtles and worms – aboard its Kavoshgar-3 rocket in 2010.
Mr Fazeli also announced plans for the launch in October of the Fajr reconnaissance satellite with "a lifespan of a year and a half, and to be placed at an altitude of 400 kilometres," the website reported.
On Wednesday, the Islamic republic successfully put its Rassad-1 (Observation-1) satellite into orbit 162 miles above the Earth.
Rassad-1, which orbits the Earth 15 times every 24 hours and has a two-month life cycle, will be used to photograph the planet and transmit images, media reports said.
Originally scheduled to launch in August 2010, the satellite was built by Malek Ashtar University in Tehran, which is linked to Iran's elite Revolutionary Guards.
Iran, which first put a satellite into orbit in 2009, has outlined an ambitious space programme amid Western concerns.
Western powers fear that Iran's space agenda might be linked to developing a ballistic missile capability that could deliver nuclear warheads.
But Tehran has repeatedly denied that its contentious nuclear and scientific programmes mask military ambitions.
