Azerbaijan, Baku, Feb.19 / Trend F.Mehdi/
Iran will launch two new satellites by 2017, the Mehr News Agency quoted Director of Iran Space Agency Hamid Fazeli as saying.
The IranSat-I satellite will be launched in 2016 and the IranSat-II satellite will be launched in 2017, he noted.
He also said that another satellite, named Qaem, will be launched by the next 10 years, with the goal of restoring broadcast of the Iranian TV channels which have been taken off international satellites.
The Iranian state-funded Press TV channel was briefly removed from the Galaxy 19 satellite on February 9, forcing the company to re-route its broadcasts in order to service viewers in the United States and Canada.
In October 2012, the Paris-based Eutelsat, one of Europe's leading satellite providers, cut Iranian state television and radio broadcasts to comply with tougher European Union sanctions on the Islamic Republic. The Eutelsat decision hit 19 channels provided by IRIB, including Press TV.
In January of this year, the Spanish government also ordered the Press-TV-affiliated Spanish language channel Hispan to stop broadcast on the Hotbird satellite platform.
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