The Iranian space program, one of the most advanced in the Middle East, has suffered extensive damage from US and Israeli airstrikes, potentially driving Tehran to deepen cooperation with China and Russia.
The Americans and Israelis have targeted infrastructure for satellites and rockets, part of an effort to destroy technology that could be used for weapons programs, according to Jim Lamson, an Iran expert and researcher at King's College London.
The targets include Iran's main satellite developer as well as facilities of the Defense Ministry and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), which are working on both weapons and space launch vehicles (SLVs), he said.
"The same organizations in the IRGC and the Defense Ministry that develop SLVs also produce ballistic missiles, so a lot of these facilities are co-located," Lamson said. "They're going to get mowed down."
The Israel Defense Forces on March 8 announced it struck a command-and-control center for Iran's Khayyam, a Russian-made surveillance satellite launched by Roscosmos, Moscow's version of NASA, in 2022.
On March 16, the IDF said the Israeli Air Force destroyed a compound in Tehran used to develop military space programs, including anti-satellite weapons.
Among other facilities attacked are the main research center of the civilian Iran Space Agency, the space command of the IRGC's Aerospace Force and an IRGC facility for rocket assembly and testing, Lamson said.
Critics of Tehran have long said its space program is part of a plan to develop weapons, given the shared technology between rockets and long-range missiles, and President Donald Trump's administration sanctioned the space agency during his first term.
"Iran's work on space-launch vehicles - including its two-stage, liquid-fueled Simorgh satellite carrier rocket - likely shortens the timeline to produce an ICBM due to the similarities in technology," General Anthony Cotton, then-commander of US Strategic Command, testified to US senators in March 2025.
One US-Israeli goal now is preventing their adversary from having access to orbit, said John Sheldon, Abu Dhabi-based founding partner of AstroAnalytica Ltd., a space consultancy.
"You can do that on a lot of the ground infrastructure without touching assets in space," he said.
The attacks on Iranian facilities don't necessarily mean the Islamic Republic can no longer use the satellites linked to those stations.
There may be other centers for the Khayyam in Iran, for instance, and Russia likely is able to control the satellite, said Tal Inbar, senior research fellow at the Missile Defense Advocacy Alliance.
"You can assume that Russia has control of the satellite, not only Iran," he said.
Moscow is currently providing Iran with various forms of intelligence, including satellite imagery and drone targeting tactics, in an effort to help Iran hit back at US forces in the region, Bloomberg has reported.
The Iranian government will likely emerge from the war with a space program that's severely weakened, said Lamson, of King's College London.
With the ability to make satellites or launch rockets severely degraded, he added, Iran will probably end up relying even more on friendly countries with far more advanced programs.
The impact from the war "may make them more dependent or more active in pursuing satellite and SLV technologies from the Russians and the Chinese," Lamson said, referring to space launch vehicles.
"That would probably be better quality than what Iranians could have" on their own, he added.
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