Res Communis

Iran says launches satellite rocket

by Joanne Irene Gabrynowicz with the blog faculty

Source: Reuters

By Parisa Hafezi and Reza Derakhshi

TEHRAN (Reuters) – Iran test-fired a domestically made satellite-carrier rocket on Wednesday, Iranian media said, a move likely to worry Western powers who fear Tehran is seeking to build a nuclear bomb.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, speaking at a ceremony to unveil three new satellites and other space technology achievements, said the Islamic Republic hoped to send astronauts into space soon.

“The field for breaking the global domineering system is the science and technology arena,” he said, referring to Iran’s foes.

Western nations fear Iran is seeking to build nuclear bombs and are concerned that the long-range ballistic technology used to put satellites into orbit can also be used to launch warheads. Iran says it has no plans to do so.

Iran, the world’s fifth-largest oil exporter, says its nuclear programme is solely to generate electricity. Ahmadinejad said on Tuesday Iran was ready to send its enriched uranium abroad in exchange for nuclear fuel.

Ahmadinejad appeared for the first time to drop long- standing conditions Tehran had set, and the United States said if Iran was serious about a deal it should tell the U.N.’s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

The Iranian president made no mention of the nuclear row at Wednesday’s aerospace event.

“Iran successfully launches home-built Kavoshgar-3 (Explorer-3) satellite rocket,” English-language television station Press TV said.

The rocket would transfer electronic data and live footage back to earth, it said.

“SIGNIFICANT” THREAT

Press TV showed footage of a rocket blasting off from a launchpad in the desert, leaving a thick vapor trail. Other Iranian media said it was a test launch.

“This was a huge breakthrough…and we hope we can send our own astronauts into space soon,” Ahmadinejad said.

He was speaking at a Tehran conference hall, where the new satellites and another satellite carrier, called Simorgh (Phoenix), were unveiled.

The event, which was broadcast live on state television, coincided with 10 days of national events marking the 31st anniversary of the 1979 Islamic revolution.

One year ago, Iran launched a domestically made satellite into orbit for the first time. It has said the launch of the Omid satellite was for peaceful telecommunications and research purposes.

In December, Iran said it test-fired a long-range, upgraded Sejil 2 missile. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown at the time said the launch was of serious concern to the international community and underlined the case for tougher sanctions.

On Monday, a Pentagon report said Iran had expanded its ballistic missile capabilities and posed a significant threat to U.S. and allied forces in the Middle East region.

To counter what Washington sees as the Iranian threat, the United States has expanded land- and sea-based missile defense systems in and around the Gulf, according to U.S. officials.

(Additional reporting by Hossein Jaseb and Fredrik Dahl; Writing by Fredrik Dahl; Editing by Angus MacSwan)

Gates sacks F-35 manager, withholds Lockheed payments

by Joanne Irene Gabrynowicz with the blog faculty

Source: Government Executive

By Megan Scully CongressDaily February 2, 2010

Frustrated with projected cost increases and schedule delays on the high-stakes F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, Defense Secretary Robert Gates announced Monday he has replaced the head of the program and is withholding $614 million from prime contractor Lockheed Martin Corp.

Gates made the announcement as he unveiled a $708.2 billion Pentagon budget proposal that includes $11.4 billion to buy 43 of the advanced fighters for the Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps and support continued research and development.

That $11.4 billion makes the F-35 the largest single weapons program in the new budget, even though they will buy nine fewer planes than had once been anticipated for fiscal 2011. Meanwhile, the military will continue to restructure the program to resolve problems that have plagued it for years.

During a Pentagon briefing, Gates said he believes the F-35 is on the right course, but added that he opted to withhold the performance fees because “the taxpayers should not have to bear the entire burden of getting the JSF program back on track.”

Lockheed Martin agreed with the decision to withhold the fees, he said.

But Gates, who has never shied away from publicly sacking high-level defense officials, said the government was also responsible for the problems with the program.

“Accountability is not just about holding contractors responsible,” he said. “The Department of Defense also bears responsibility for the JSF’s troubling performance record.”

The department ultimately plans to buy more than 2,400 of the planes to replace older fighters, including the Air Force’s F-16s and the Navy’s F-18s.

With Gates giving his brand of tough love to the F-35 program and other senior officials predicting only modest increases in defense spending for the next several years, a clear warning emerged from the Pentagon that years of belt-tightening lay ahead.

“Reforming how and what we buy continues to be an urgent priority,” Gates said. “The department and the nation can no longer afford the quixotic pursuit of high-tech perfection that incurs unacceptable cost and risk, nor can the department afford to chase requirements that shift or continue to increase throughout a program’s lifecycle.”

The fiscal 2011 request includes $548.9 billion for the Defense Department’s base budget — an $18.2 billion, or 3.4 percent increase, over fiscal 2010 enacted levels. But with inflation factored in, real growth in the base budget is 1.8 percent, officials said.

Over the next four years, the Pentagon anticipates real growth in the defense budget to be roughly 1 percent. The Defense, Homeland Security and Veterans Affairs departments were excluded from President Obama’s three-year discretionary spending freeze announced last week.

Pentagon Comptroller Robert Hale said department officials feel strongly that they need “modest, real growth” to train, equip and grow a military that is at war. But he added, they recognize the country’s economic challenges.

“We can accommodate 1 percent annual growth in the short-term and still maintain the current forces, and we’re doing it, frankly, to try to be mindful of a serious economic problem and make our contribution to that,” Hale said.

Procurement accounts, the low-hanging fruit in the Pentagon budget, are not the only ones scrubbed for savings.

Hale urged Congress not to add a half-percent to the military pay raise — an annual practice that costs the department $500 million. The administration requested a 1.4 percent pay raise for the troops, which is lower than recent memory but on par with the private sector, officials said.

Meanwhile, Gates said he wants to work with Congress on a way to get military healthcare costs under control. Lawmakers have repeatedly rejected efforts to raise premiums or co-pays, which have not been increased since 1995.

As he did last year, Gates did not propose raising co-pays because he did not want to be caught with a gaping budget hole if Congress blocked the increases.

“We certainly would like to work with the Congress in figuring out a way to try and bring some modest control to this program,” he said.

Conference on Disarmament Statements

by P.J. Blount with the blog faculty

The 2010 Conference on Disarmament is underway, and statements are beginning to be posted on the CD’s website. Those that address PAROS will be linked at Res Communis:

January 19: Mexico – Ambassador Gomez Camacho (Spanish)

Scientific and Technical Subcommittee: 2010 Forty-seventh session, 8 – 19 February 2010

by P.J. Blount with the blog faculty

A Provisional Agenda for the UNCOPUOS Scientific and Technical Subcommittee 2010 session (8 – 19 February 2010) has been posted on the UNOOSA website.

France Seeks ITU Help To Halt Satellite Signal Jamming by Iran

by Joanne Irene Gabrynowicz with the blog faculty

Source: Space News

by Peter B. de Selding

PARIS — French regulators have asked the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) to intervene with the Iranian government to persuade Tehran to stop jamming satellite signals from the BBC World Service’s Persian-language broadcasts into Iran, according to the director of France’s National Frequencies Agency (ANF).

ANF Director Francois Rancy said the appeal to the ITU was made the first week of January only after numerous French requests to Iran to stop the interference went unanswered over the past seven months.

Rancy, a veteran international-frequency regulator who chaired the ITU’s World Radiocommunication Conference in late 2007, said that while he hoped ITU pressure would affect Iran’s behavior, he was not counting on an immediate stop to the practice.

“The ITU is really a gentlemen’s club,” Rancy said in a Jan. 5 interview. “It depends on the goodwill of its members. There is no mechanism for forcing an administration into compliance with the rules.”

The Geneva-based ITU is a United Nations affiliate that regulates satellite and other wireless communications frequencies and satellite orbital slots. In recent years it has regularly tried, without success, to get the U.S. government to stop jamming legal radio and television broadcasts from Cuba, which the ITU says is done with low-flying aircraft operating in international airspace.

In another example, Slovenian television broadcasters and the ITU have sought to stop Italian broadcasters from overstepping their frequency assignments with signal transmissions that interfere with Slovenian broadcasts. According to ITU documents, Slovenian regulators sent more than 200 reports to Italy citing interference, saying Italy was using frequencies that had not been coordinated with its neighbors.

In both these cases, the alleged offending administrations — the United States and Italy — have all but refused to acknowledge the ITU requests.

The BBC Persian programming carried on the Eutelsat Hot Bird 6 satellite stationed at 13 degrees east was jammed starting last spring during Iran’s elections, and it has continued intermittently ever since, particularly during the broadcaster’s coverage of the death of a reformist Iranian cleric.

An official with Paris-based Eutelsat acknowledged that locating the source of frequency interference is often difficult. But in this case, Eutelsat contacted other satellite operators to compare notes about broadcasts in the region and performed tests over an extended period of time, and concluded that the jamming signals were coming from Iranian territory.

The Eutelsat official said one way of determining whether interference is intentional or accidental is to move the affected programming to another transponder on the satellite to see whether the jamming then stops.

Once it is determined beyond a reasonable doubt that the interference was coming from Iran, Eutelsat contacted ANF, which then contacted Iran in multiple letters sent since mid-2009, Rancy said.

For the BBC, a solution to the problem is likely to involve using replacement capacity on Eutelsat satellites whose beams make it impossible for Iranian authorities to uplink interference to the satellite. The BBC in recent months has shifted its programming to Eutelsat capacity on the Telstar 12 satellite at 15 degrees west, a location that relieves the jamming but also makes it difficult for the BBC’s Iranian audience to capture the satellite’s downlink.

The British broadcaster has also used Eutelsat’s W2M satellite at 3.1 degrees west, which offers a better signal-reception angle for Iranian dish antennas but features a narrow beam whose uplink cannot be accessed from Iranian soil, the Eutelsat official said.

“There are no easy and definitive solutions,” the Eutelsat official said. “But when we can, we can move programming to a satellite whose location makes it impossible for jammers in a given location to target the satellite.”

BBC World Service did not respond to requests for comment about whether the use of other satellites will provide a permanent solution to the problem or whether the broadcast audience will be sharply reduced as viewers need to repoint their rooftop antennas to the new satellites.

In a Dec. 21 statement following a fresh round of Hot Bird 6 jamming that started Dec. 20, the broadcaster said: “The BBC is looking at ways to increase the options for its Farsi-speaking audiences in Iran, Afghanistan and Tajikistan, which may include broadcasting on other satellites.”