As much as the Iranian regime pisses me off, I admire their retro-approach.Reuters on news.yahoo.com wrote:Iran has successfully launched a live monkey into space, the state news agency IRNA said on Monday, touting it as an advance in a missile and space program that has alarmed the West and Israel.
This is obviously a propaganda effort, probably more to placate the population than any actual building of a threat against foreign powers. But to step so far back, to pluck a move straight from the last cold war, that almost has style. But only almost.
Now, don't worry, this does not mean they have mastered the technology for building reentry vehicles for atom bombs.
This thing went 120 km high, and since Iran probably can't go picking space capsules out of the Indian Ocean, it didn't even have any great distance to cover, probably pretty close to straight up and down again. Speed would have been very reasonable, a simple parachute doing most of the work of slowing it down upon "reentry". A missile that can cover any distance, or rather it's warhead, would have to survive much, much greater speeds and hence much, much greater friction upon reentry. Even that isn't particularly complicated for a bunch of competent engineers, blunt-body theory and the chemistry for ablative heat shields are both well publicized and have been done for five decades. The trick for warheads is the opposite of space capsules - don't let it slow down too much, don't let it get too hot, or it'll be easier to detect and perhaps shoot down. Which is why while the Thor missile had a warhead that looked a lot like a space capsule, subsequent generations of missiles had and have warheads that look like a pointy implement or a sugarloaf.
Even if they were trying to test a reentry vehicle with that monkey, lacking information on the footprint of the trajectory of this thing, I doubt it's enough of a test to validate something that could keep a bomb in one piece to hit Israel.
