Iran to commission Chabahar cosmodrome in H2 2024

The commissioning of a new Chabahar cosmodrome in south-eastern Iran is scheduled for H2 2024, TASS reports with reference to the Head of Iran’s Space Agency, Hassan Salariyeh

"The construction of the Chabahar cosmodrome is now in its final stage, and the commissioning of its first stage is scheduled for 2025 [according to the Iranian calendar, it starts on March 21st, 2024], and the first launches will then be carried out from Chabahar," Hassan Salariyeh said, adding that Iran also launches spacecraft from other facilities overseen by the country's military department and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

According to the official, Iran's priority is to get on the list of the five strongest space powers in the world. At the moment, the Islamic Republic is ‘one of the ten countries with the most developed space programme’. In addition, Hassan Salariyeh called the possibility of ‘providing services for the launch, design and production of satellites for other states’ one of the goals of the development of the country's space industry.

Speaking about Iran's plans to send humans into space, Hassan Salariyeh announced the launches of new bio-capsules of greater mass and size in 2024 and 2025. On December 6th, 2023, Iran announced the successful launch of a new bio-capsule weighing 500kg – developed by the Iranian Aerospace Industry Organisation as part of the implementation of the roadmap for sending humans into space – outside the Earth's atmosphere. Earlier, the Islamic Republic announced that it plans to send the first Iranian spacecraft with an astronaut on board beyond the Earth within the next five years.

In September last year, the Iranian Space Agency announced that, in 2025, it is planned to launch a satellite into a sun-synchronous orbit from the Chabahar cosmodrome, which is likely to become a base for launching vehicles within the framework of international space programmes by 2031.

Iran began its space programme in 2004, and it is one of the nine countries in the world that produce satellites. Iran is one of the 24 founding countries of the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space established in 1959.