Omid era

On the night of 2 February 2009, a slender two-stage rocket called Safir rose from a desert site in Iran's Semnan province carrying Omid, a small satellite whose name means Hope in Farsi. When it reached orbit, Iran became the ninth nation in history to place a satellite into space on its own rocket. The exclusive club of launching nations, founded by the Soviet Union in 1957, had not admitted a new member in twenty-one years. The last country through the door had been Israel.

Israel's entry came on 19 September 1988, when a Shavit rocket lifted the experimental Ofeq 1 satellite from Palmachim Air Base on the Mediterranean coast. Geography forced an extraordinary choice: rather than launch eastward with Earth's rotation, as every other spacefaring nation does, Israel fired westward over the sea, into a retrograde orbit, so that spent stages would never fall on neighbouring countries. The penalty is paid in payload, and Israel pays it on every flight. Ofeq 1 circled Earth for nearly four months before re-entering on 14 January 1989.

Through the 2000s Israel quietly matured this capability, lofting a series of Ofeq reconnaissance satellites on improved Shavit vehicles, sovereignty in orbit built from a coastline barely 200 kilometres long. Omid, for its part, completed more than 700 orbits in seven weeks before re-entering on 25 April 2009. Together the two programmes marked a turning point: indigenous access to space, once the preserve of Cold War giants, now belonged to small and mid-sized states pursuing it for security, prestige and independence.

The club kept growing. North Korea reached orbit in December 2012, and South Korea's fully indigenous Nuri rocket succeeded in 2022. But the era that Omid's launch crystallised, when orbital capability spread to nations outside the traditional powers, traces its modern roots to that westward-flying Israeli rocket of 1988 and the nine-member club it helped create by 2009.