Iran Touts Big Ballistic Missile And Lightweight Solid Fuel Rocket Motor Leaps

If you are a friend of the blog, you might have heard of Iran’s program to develop a solid propellant space launcher, the relationship of the space launch program to Iran’s missile ambitions and the 2011 explosion that wiped out most of the personnel associated with it. 

To make a long story short, at some point in the mid-2000s, the founding father of Iran’s missile program, Hassan Tehrani Moghaddam —  frustrated with both the Supreme Leader’s 2,000 km range limit and the slow bureaucratic apparatus of Iran’s missile industry – decided to set up an institutionally separate development effort for a solid propellant space launch vehicle that would also serve as a hedging strategy to acquire long-range missile technology. This move was surely aided by his close ties to Khamenei. 

Unlike Iran’s well publicized liquid-fuel space program, Moghaddam’s project proceeded in complete secrecy until a large explosion killed Moghaddam and obliterated the Bidganeh site in 2011. Thanks to the hundreds of tiny puzzle pieces released over the years, we managed to reconstruct much of the history of this program. However, the most important question of all remained unanswered.