The Salman () is a solid-propellant rocket motor designed and built by the

Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), also known as the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, is a multi-service primary branch of the Islamic Republic of Iran Armed Forces, Iranian Armed Forces. It was officially established by Ruhollah Khom ...

. It is used as the second stage of the Qased and Qaem-100 satellite

launch vehicle A launch vehicle is typically a rocket-powered vehicle designed to carry a payload (a crewed spacecraft or satellites) from Earth's surface or lower atmosphere to outer space. The most common form is the ballistic missile-shaped multistage ...

s. The system was announced on 9 February 2020 and was launched for the first time on 22 April 2020, placing

Iran Iran, officially the Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI) and also known as Persia, is a country in West Asia. It borders Iraq to the west, Turkey, Azerbaijan, and Armenia to the northwest, the Caspian Sea to the north, Turkmenistan to the nort ...

's first military satellite, named Noor, into orbit.

Design

Salman weighs 1,900 kilograms, has a diameter of 1 meter, and fires for 60 seconds. In contrast to previous Iranian commercial and military rocket designs, Salman has a wound carbon-fiber composite casing rather than the traditional steel motor casings typical of other Iranian designs, this drastically reduces weight and improves performance, allowing for more payload capacity. Another break with past Iranian designs is the first ever use of gimballed thrust vector control (TVC) for steering as opposed to aerodynamic control surfaces, jet vanes, or

vernier thruster A vernier thruster is a rocket engine used on a spacecraft or launch vehicle for fine adjustments to the attitude or velocity. Depending on the design of a craft's maneuvering and stability systems, it may simply be a smaller thruster complement ...

s previously used. A steerable

nozzle A nozzle is a device designed to control the direction or characteristics of a fluid flow (specially to increase velocity) as it exits (or enters) an enclosed chamber or pipe (material), pipe. A nozzle is often a pipe or tube of varying cross ...

provides several advantages to Salman as opposed to other methods that result in its superior performance and efficiency; as opposed to jet vanes, no thrust is lost in a gimballed system when steering; control surfaces only work in endo-atmospheric flight and cannot be used for injecting satellites or

atmospheric re-entry Atmospheric entry (sometimes listed as Vimpact or Ventry) is the movement of an object from outer space into and through the gases of an atmosphere of a planet, dwarf planet, or natural satellite. Atmospheric entry may be ''uncontrolled entr ...

;

s and their associated piping,

turbopump A turbopump is a fluid pump with two main components: a rotodynamic pump and a driving gas turbine, usually both mounted on the same shaft, or sometimes geared together. They were initially developed in Germany in the early 1940s. The most co ...

s and tanks are heavy and their omission could make way for a larger payload.

Launch history

References

{{Rocket engines Rocket stages

Design

Launch history

See also

References