Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton quickly issued a warning to Iran.
"President Obama has signaled his intention to support tough and direct diplomacy with Iran, but if Tehran does not comply with United Nations Security Council and IAEA mandates, there must be consequences," Clinton said Tuesday in Washington, with German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier at her side. IAEA is the acronym for the International Atomic Energy Agency, the U.N. nuclear monitor that has unsuccessfully sought answers from Iran on its nuclear program.
State Department spokesman Robert Wood, who called the launch "a matter of great concern," told reporters that any attempt by Iran to improve its military capacity violates Security Council resolutions forbidding it from developing its missile technology.
The launch doesn't immediately alter the region's strategic calculus. Iran has long had missiles that could reach 800 or so miles away to its regional rival, Israel.
One expert estimated that Iran could now theoretically deliver a payload of up to 1,500 pounds about 1,500 miles away, allowing it a greater range but one that does not reach North America or much of Europe.
At the same time, "once someone has the ability to launch something into space it can, in fact, reach every place on the face of the Earth," Uzi Rubin, a former Israeli defense official, said in a television interview aired in Israel.
Iran hired Russia to launch its first domestically built satellite into space in 2005, and another one jointly owned by Iran, China and Thailand was sent into orbit last year by a Chinese rocket. Iran in August test-launched its first satellite carrier rocket, Safir-1, in what U.S. officials then dismissed as a failure.
Some experts said at the time that the U.S. was engaged in wishful thinking, downplaying Iran's growing capabilities in order to deny it leverage in negotiations.
According to Iranian media, Omid is a telecommunications research satellite that will transmit data while orbiting Earth 15 times a day. It is equipped with telemetry and geographic information system technology and will return within three months "with data that will help Iranian experts send an operational satellite into space," Press TV said.
But experts stressed that the significance of Iran's accomplishment lay in the fact that it had mastered rocket technology to place an object at least 150 miles above Earth. In that sense, they said, it was similar to the Soviet Union's Sputnik-1 satellite launch in 1957, which showed that the Soviets could build an intercontinental ballistic missile.
