Breaking news in the world of crazy backwards regimes that want to prove they’re capable of something more than just killing their own citizens: Iran has put a monkey in to space. Exact details about the mission are limited at the moment, but the monkey must be male because it travelled unaccompanied.
The news comes from the Al-Alam News Network by way of Russian media. We don’t know if the launch was a success yet but Iran has been threatening to hurtle a chimp in to the stratosphere for some time now. According to the Voice of Russia, it has previously sent up “mice, turtles and worms” and Deputy Science Minister Mohammad Mehdinejad-Nouri says that putting animals in to space is “strategic, and a priority.” Presumably it’s all part of developing the country’s long term nuclear capability, helping it to strike every corner of the earth with its righteous radioactive fury. Of course, I could be being ungenerous. It’s just as possible that the Islamic republic wants to build a giant petting zoo on the moon.
It increasingly feels like the only countries that are still participating in the space race are ones that have no cause to be up there. Why isn’t Iran, say, spending the money on feeding its own people? Its economy is in a mess and the cause is man made; undemocratic states tend to have far less balanced patterns of development than democratic ones. Even outgoing President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has finally turned on the Revolutionary Guard, asking why it is exempt from tax. The Guard owns large amounts of wealthy land that, if sold off, could account a substantial portion of the state budget. But while Ahmadinejad deserves plaudits for finally taking on his country’s establishment, the attempt to breed a new generation of astro-monkeys suggests that his own priorities are messed up.
The engagement of authoritarian regimes in the space race is purely about justifying their iron-like grip on their own countries and intimidating the rest of the world – crying, “Look at us, we’re still here! We still matter!” There’s probably less danger from the military potential of their experiments than there is from them going wrong. What if the Iranian monkey gets distracted by something shiny and ploughs that rocket in to the North Korean satellite – itself piloted by a hamster on speed? One can imagine them plummeting back down to Earth and wrecking a green house in Milton Keynes. A few days later, Mrs Butterfield of 54 Hillingdon Rise gets an grovelling phone call from the Iranian Embassy: “Can we have our monkey back please…?”
