With the Vienna talks on a new Iran nuclear deal at an impasse, the Islamic Republic is making preparations to fire a ballistic missile into space.
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The likely blast off at Iran's Imam Khomeini Spaceport comes as Iranian state media has offered a list of upcoming planned satellite launches in the works for the Islamic Republic's civilian space program, which has been beset by a series of failed launches. Iran's paramilitary Revolutionary Guard runs its own parallel program that successfully put a satellite into orbit last year.
But all this fits into a renewed focus on space by Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi, said Jeffrey Lewis, an expert at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies who studies Tehran's program. With Iran's former President Hassan Rouhani who shepherded the nuclear deal out of office, concerns about alienating the talks with launches that the US asserts aids Tehran's ballistic missile program likely have faded.
"They're not walking on eggshells," Lewis said. "I think Raisi's people have a new balance in mind."
Iranian state media did not acknowledge the activity at the spaceport and Iran's mission to the United Nations did not respond to a request for comment. The US military, which tracks space launches, did not respond to requests for comment.
Satellite images taken Saturday by Planet Labs Inc. obtained by The Associated Press show activity at the spaceport in the desert plains of Iran's rural Semnan province, some 240 kilometers (150 miles) southeast of Tehran.
A support vehicle stood parked alongside a massive white gantry that typically houses a rocket on the launch pad. That support vehicle has appeared in other satellite photos at the site just ahead of a launch. Also visible is a hydraulic crane with a railed platform, also seen before previous launches and likely used to service the rocket.
Other satellite images in recent days at the spaceport have shown an increase in the number of cars at the facility, another sign of heightened activity that typically precedes a launch. A building also believed to be the "checkout" facility for a rocket has seen increased activity as well, Lewis said.
Meanwhile, Iran said on Sunday that European countries had failed to offer constructive proposals to help to revive a 2015 nuclear deal, after Britain said there was still time for Tehran to save it but that this was the last chance.
Talks have resumed in Vienna to try to revive the nuclear pact, with both sides trying to gauge the prospects of success after the latest exchanges in the stop-start negotiations.
British Foreign Secretary Liz Truss said earlier on Sunday: "This is the last chance for Iran to come to the negotiating table with a serious resolution to this issue, which has to be agreeing the terms of the JCPOA [nuclear accord]."
Conducting a missile launch amid the Vienna talks fits the hard-line posture struck by Tehran's negotiators, who already described six previous rounds of diplomacy as a "draft," exasperating Western nations. Germany's new foreign minister has gone as far as to warn that "time is running out for us at this point."
However, on Sunday, Iran's chief negotiator, Ali Bakri Kani, reported progress on an agenda for talks with global powers over its nuclear program, as Britain said the Vienna negotiations were Tehran's "last chance."
"The two parties are at the point of agreeing on the matters which should be on the agenda," Tehran's chief negotiator Bakri Kani told the official IRNA news agency.
"It's a positive and important evolution since, at the start, they weren't even in agreement on the issues to negotiate," he said.
i24NEWS and Reuters contributed to this report.
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