The war has prompted protests globally, calling for a stop to the bombing of Iran. Photo / Henry Nicholls, AFP
Has the Ayatollah gone interstellar? That is something nobody expected to be asking at the end of last year. Yet after his missile attack on Britain’s airbase on Diego Garcia, which lies an improbable 3800 or so kilometres from Iran, that is exactly what experts are wondering.
In truth, the regime has been using space weapons for a while. That, after all, is how ballistics work. Each missile, which is the size of a London bus, is fired out of the atmosphere using a rocket engine and traces an elliptical path through space before re-entering at hypersonic speeds and descending to the target. This gives Tehran a range of up to almost 3000km. Before the war, Iran had a stockpile of thousands. This has been significantly reduced but remains a menace.
Diego Garcia lies several hundred kilometres out of range. On Saturday (local time), however, it emerged that the British base – now fully supporting American long-range bombers – had been targeted by two Iranian projectiles. One failed in flight, while the other was intercepted by a US Arleigh Burke-class guided missile destroyer.
How did Tehran shoot that far? More importantly, if the regime rotated those same launchers 180 degrees, London may find itself in range.
According to experts, it seems unlikely that Iran has managed to develop an entirely new class of missiles with such speed and secrecy. Instead, the regime may have ingeniously repurposed rockets from its space programme.
Before the war, Iran’s civilian space agency and the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps had jointly developed a suite of homegrown rockets, including the Safir, Simorgh and Qased, which were paired with Russian launch services. Last year, Tehran successfully sent its heaviest-ever payload – a telecommunications satellite and space tug weighing about 300kg – into orbit using two Simorghs.
On Monday (local time), Israel announced that it had destroyed a military space facility in the Iranian capital used to develop “capacities for attacking satellites, posing a threat to the State of Israel’s satellites and to space assets of other countries around the world”.
But with multiple space agency headquarters in and around Tehran and others in Shahrud and Qom, it is far from clear that the project has been put out of action.
The Simorgh, also known as the Safir-2, is a two-stage, liquid-fuelled rocket designed to carry satellites into space. About 27m long and weighing 87 tonnes, it was the first Iranian-made launch vehicle capable of placing multiple payloads into orbit. Historically, its overly-complicated engines and turbopumps have made it unreliable, but its success rate has been improving in recent years. Such is its size and speed that even without a warhead, it would cause immense destruction. Add explosives the size of an IRA truck bomb into the picture and London would face carnage.
Repurposing space rockets as weapons would be awkward, to say the least. Many ballistic missiles are powered by solid fuel, meaning that they are ready to fire at short notice, with limited preparation. The Iranians often mount them on lorries. The space rockets, by contrast, normally use liquid fuel as part of the launch process, so it can take several hours to fill them with a mixture of fuel and oxidiser at a specialist complex before they are ready to be activated. This makes them harder to move about and easier to locate and destroy.
Iran’s collection of space rockets is also much smaller than its arsenal of ballistic missiles, so they would need to be deployed sparingly. Could the attempted strike on Diego Garcia be a pilot operation for the strategic weaponisation of space technology against the West? And with the United States more than 11,000km from Iranian soil, could London be first in the firing line?
The regime certainly seems reckless enough. Since the start of the war, it has targeted all its neighbours, even those such as Qatar and Turkey, which had previously fostered warm relations with the regime. The harder Tehran is hit, the wilder it is lashing out.
On Friday (local time), General Abolfazl Shekarchi, Iran’s military spokesman, directly threatened the West on state television: “From now on, based on the information we have about you, even parks, recreational areas and tourist destinations anywhere in the world will no longer be safe for you.”
The danger could hardly be clearer.
How well is Britain defended against ballistic air assaults? It will come as no surprise that the answer is “not very”. Its warplanes, which are designed to combat enemy aircraft, cruise missiles and drones, are no match for ballistics. Its six Type 45 destroyers, like the lamentably unready ship the HMS Dragon, may handle the low-end, quasi-ballistic munitions fired by the Houthis – the HMS Diamond managed to intercept one of these in the Red Sea last April – but they are likewise ineffective against true ballistics like the space rockets. Most of these ships are not ready for deployment anyway.
American SM-3 missile defence systems are stationed across Eastern Europe; on a good day, that may save London. Does that make you breathe easier? Me neither.
If the UK had Patriot missiles, like the Germans and the Poles, or even a homegrown equivalent like the French, we could station them around our capital and be in with a sporting chance. As things stand, however, our skies are almost completely undefended.
Put yourself in the shoes of the Ayatollah. Sitting in Tehran with a limited stockpile of space rockets, wouldn’t you launch them at the softest target of all?
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