Follow us on social

With timing of rocket blast,  Iran flexes muscles — in space

With timing of rocket blast, Iran flexes muscles — in space

Escalation in the Middle East is coming from far above the Earth's surface

Analysis | Middle East

On Jan. 20, 2024, Iran’s Revolutionary Guards successfully launched a three-stage rocket that put the Sorayya satellite into orbit, at an unprecedented 460 miles above the Earth’s surface.

It is alleged that Iran’s space program is a cover for testing a nuclear weapons delivery system. What is a scientific victory for Iran could also be a strategic projection of the Islamic Republic’s geo-spatial power.

While this space launch was planned days in advance, it occurred on the same day that Israeli forces allegedly killed five Revolutionary Guards of the expeditionary Quds Force in Damascus, followed by an Iraqi militia affiliated with Iran firing ballistic missiles at a base housing American forces in Iraq.

Just five days earlier, Iran launched salvos of ballistic missiles towards Syria, Iraq, and Pakistan against alleged terrorist bases.

The recent satellite launch into space is connected to these political tensions on the ground. It sent a message to the U.S. and Israel that, despite sanctions or the assassination of its scientists, Iran can still develop the technology to fire a long-distance missile, whether into space or over a continent. If the sanctions and assassinations were meant to curtail such activities, Iran demonstrated they are not working.

This points to an unexamined aspect of the conflict in the Middle East since Oct. 7, 2023: Outer space has become a conflict zone. When Iraqi Shi’a militias or Yemeni Houthis launch a drone or ballistic missile, these weapons either enter space or depend on satellites.

What the latest Iranian launch has also demonstrated is that the conflicts of Earth — the current fighting in the Middle East in this case — have been projected into space, reminiscent of a trend that began with the Cold War superpowers.

Militarizing space

A ballistic missile burns up the fuel that propels it into the atmosphere until it enters space. Once the fuel is consumed, the missile’s trajectory cannot be altered, following a path determined by gravity pulling it back toward the Earth’s surface — and its eventual target. The German V-2 was the first ballistic missile. Fired on September 8, 1944, it was the first human-made object hurtled into space. As they invaded Germany, both the U.S. and Soviets sought out the German rocket scientists to develop their respective missile/space programs. The V-2’s technology allowed the U.S. and Soviets to send satellites into space, even allowing astronauts to reach the moon itself.

In October 1957, the Soviets launched the first satellite, Sputnik, into space, where it orbited the earth and delivered a prestigious victory for communism during the Cold War. According to historian Douglas Brinkley, “For a world locked in a Cold War rivalry between the Americans and the Soviets, space quickly became the new arena of battle.” Space launchers and launches were a means of refining military technology discreetly, in the name of space exploration, while simultaneously broadcasting these advances to adversaries and allies.

From an American national security perspective, if the USSR could launch a satellite into space, it could do the same with a nuclear warhead, putting American territory in danger. Furthermore, a missile/ rocket might carry a physical payload, such as a satellite or a warhead, but it also carries a political message intended to communicate to adversaries short of violence. That dynamic is what made the Cold War cold.

The same threat perceptions explain why the U.S. feared Iran’s satellite program well before the regional war escalated last October, pitting American forces against the Islamic Republic’s allies in Yemen and Iraq.

The American and Soviet space programs were also about prestige, and the most recent launch has been a matter of national prestige for Iran in the aftermath of the deadly terrorist blasts that occurred in the nation on Jan. 3.

Middle East geopolitics and astropolitics

As for the Middle East, historically, outer space was an area used to penetrate the region. During the Cold War, the U.S. and USSR deployed spy satellites above the Middle East, and later satellites were essential for the global positioning system (GPS) to guide American cruise missiles and drones used against Iraq during the 1991 Gulf War, and then against al-Qaida after 2001.

In the 21st century, the Global South entered the space arena, led by China, India, and Iran. Space soon emerged as an arena for competition among Middle Eastern states. Among the Persian Gulf regimes, Qatar achieved asymmetric power in the 1990s against Saudi Arabia by broadcasting Al Jazeera to its much larger neighbor, as well as the entire region, via a news channel that depends on satellite technology. The United Arab Emirates is currently bolstering its credentials as a regional Sparta by embarking on a mission to Mars.

Israel, however, had a monopoly on space technology and putting its own satellites into space. Iran’s current space program serves as a means to challenge a regional rival as well as a superpower — the U.S.

At the same time, Iran’s allies in the “Axis of Resistance” have militarized space. Iran gave Houthis drone technology that can fly long distances to strike Saudi Arabia and the UAE. Houthi drone attacks are guided by satellite technology, as a drone flying at such a long range depends on a satellite data link for information to be sent back to the pilot in Yemen.

As for Houthi drones, they are GPS-guided to their target before crashing into it to wreak havoc and damage. The Houthis have no known communications satellites and rely on commercially available satellite space. These attacks demonstrate a sophisticated level of coordination among the Houthis, who use 3D printing to build the drones and the components based on Iranian designs, while imagery analysts, uplink engineers, mechanics, and pilot crews work in unison to support the attacks. By 2022, Houthi strikes were one of the factors that pushed Saudi Arabia and the UAE to extricate themselves from the Yemen conflict, which also gave an advantage to Iran, the Gulf countries’ regional adversary.

The Houthis mastered both drone technology and ballistic missiles. The Soviets transformed the German V-2 into the Scud, the most widely proliferated ballistic missile in the Arab world. The Houthis inherited Scuds from the former government after the Arab Spring. In 2017, they fired them towards Saudi Arabia. In 2023, the Houthis launched both drones and ballistic missiles towards Israel’s southern port of Eilat, in solidarity with Hamas.

In 2017, the Houthis attacked King Salman air base in Saudi Arabia and as well as Riyadh with the Burkan 2-H, a ballistic Scud-type missile inherited from the old Yemeni arsenal, and engineered with a range of more than 500 miles to hit the Saudi capital. Unlike the Burkan, the missiles that were launched towards Eilat were most likely based on the Iranian Ghadr (or Qadr) a close relative of the North Korean Nodong, basically a larger missile based on the original Soviet Scud missile, with more than double the range at 1,200 miles. These Houthi ballistic missiles reached outer space, where Israel’s Arrow defense system intercepted them in the stratosphere, marking the first instance of space combat in history.

The Islamic Republic’s most recent space launch has sent a message to Israel that Iran is catching up. The message to the U.S. is that Iran is in a stronger position after Trump’s 2017 unilateral withdrawal from the nuclear deal. Afterwards, Iran had the excuse to advance its centrifuge nuclear technology, its nuclear stockpile, and now advance its space program.

Meanwhile, the message to the Iranian people is that, while its economy is under sanctions and they endure terrorist attacks, at least they can take national pride in reaching space.


Iranian satellite carrier rocket "Simorgh" is seen in an unknown location in Iran, in this picture obtained on December 30, 2021. Ministry of Defense of Iran/WANA (West Asia News Agency)/Handout via REUTERS

Analysis | Middle East
US Capitol
Top image credit: Lucky-photographer via shutterstock.com

Why does peace cost a trillion dollars?

Washington Politics

As Congress returns from its summer recess, Washington’s attention is turning towards a possible government shutdown.

While much of the focus will be on a showdown between Senate Democrats and Donald Trump, a subplot is brewing as the House and Senate, led by Republicans but supported by far too many Democrats, fight over how big the Pentagon’s budget should be. The House voted to give Trump his requested trillion dollar budget, while the Senate is demanding $22 billion more.

keep readingShow less
Yemen Ahmed al-Rahawi
Top image credit: Funeral in Sana a for senior Houthi officials killed in Israeli strikes Honor guard hold up a portraits of Houthi government s the Prime Minister Ahmed al-Rahawi and other officials killed in Israeli airstrikes on Thursday, during a funeral ceremony at the Shaab Mosque in Sanaa, Yemen, 01 September 2025. IMAGO/ via REUTERS

Israel playing with fire in Yemen

Middle East

“The war has entered a new phase,” declared Mohammed al-Bukhaiti, a senior official in Yemen’s Ansar Allah movement, after Israeli jets streaked across the Arabian Peninsula to kill the group’s prime minister and a swathe of his cabinet in Yemen’s capital, Sana’a.

The senior official from Ansar Allah, the movement commonly known as the Houthis, was not wrong. The strike, which Israel’s Defense Minister Israel Katz promised was “just the beginning,” signaled a fundamental shift in the cartography of a two-year war of attrition between the region’s most technologically advanced military and its most resilient guerrilla force.

The retaliation was swift, if militarily ineffective: missiles launched towards Israel disintegrated over Saudi Arabia. Internally, a paranoid crackdown ensued on perceived spies. Houthi security forces stormed the offices of the World Food Programme and UNICEF, detaining at least 11 U.N. personnel in a sweep immediately condemned by the U.N. Secretary General.

The catalyst for this confrontation was the war in Gaza, unleashed by Hamas’s October 7 attacks on Israel, which provided the Houthis with the ideological fuel and political opportunity to transform themselves. Seizing the mantle of Palestinian solidarity — a cause their leader, Abdul-Malik al-Houthi, frames as a “sacrifice in the cause of God Almighty ” — they graduated from a menacing regional actor into a global disruptor, launching missiles toward Israel just weeks after Hamas’s attacks and holding one of the world’s most vital shipping lanes hostage.

The chessboard was dangerously rearranged in May, when the Trump administration, eager for an off-ramp from a costly and ineffective air campaign, brokered a surprise truce with the Houthis. Mediated by Oman, the deal was simple: the U.S. would stop bombing Houthi targets, and the Houthis would stop attacking American ships. President Trump, in his characteristic style, claimed the Houthis had “capitulated” while also praising their “bravery.”

keep readingShow less
TRump  and Mikheil Kavelashvili
Top photo credit: President Trump (shutterstock/Maxim Elramsisy) and Georgian president Mikheil Kavelashvili ( President of Azerbaijan)

Georgia Dream hopes Trump is ticket out of geopolitical purgatory

Europe

For economic reasons but also for self-preservation, Georgia does not want to be dragged into picking sides in its relations with larger powers. Its president’s open letter to Donald Trump may be an effort to balance growing Chinese influence.

President Mikheil Kavelashvili’s letter to Trump urges a restoration of strategic ties with Washington. It struck the tone of a forsaken friend, talking about the lack of U.S. focus, raising “doubts and questions among the Georgian people about how free and sincere your administration’s actions are in terms of strengthening peace in the region.” He even bemoans Trump’s reinstatement of relations with President Putin.

keep readingShow less

LATEST

QIOSK

Newsletter

Subscribe now to our weekly round-up and don't miss a beat with your favorite RS contributors and reporters, as well as staff analysis, opinion, and news promoting a positive, non-partisan vision of U.S. foreign policy.