A former NASA scientist and pioneering small-satellite entrepreneur has been charged with evading the United State’s trade embargo against Iran. Nader Modanlo, an Iranian-born US citizen, allegedly supported the 2005 launch of Iran’s first satellite in violation of a trade embargo.

A 2 June indictment by a federal grand jury brings ten counts of export control violations against the 49-year-old Modanlo and five Iranian co-conspirators. He was arrested on 8 June. The case is the latest in a series of export control-related arrests that have worried scientists, who fear they might inadvertently run afoul of the complex laws.

But according to a press release from the US Attorney’s Office in Greenbelt Maryland, Modanlo’s actions were deliberate and calculated. The indictment says that Modanlo played a key role in the 2005 launch of an Iranian satellite “equipped with a camera” aboard a Russian rocket. He also appears to have created a series of sham companies to receive payments totalling US$10 million from the Iranian government for his role in the launch.

Modanlo arrived in the United States in the 1970s and was educated at George Washington University, in Washington, DC, according to a report from the Washington Post. He went to work for NASA, but left the space agency in 1992 to found Final Analysis, a Maryland-based firm that hoped to use small satellites to track everything from delivery trucks to water supplies. Modanlo successfully raised US$10 million in private funding, and in 1995, his company was the first US firm to ever launch a satellite aboard a Russian rocket.

At the time, the potential availability of cheap Russian launch vehicles, together with shrinking satellite technology, made commercial space look particularly attractive to investors, and Modanlo’s company, together with other small start-ups like Iridium, looked poised to make a fortune.

But space is an expensive place and Modanlo’s dreams never quite came to pass. Russian red-tape hampered the launch of Final Analysis’s second satellite, and the company never took off. According to the indictment, by 2001 creditors had attempted to force his company into involuntary bankruptcy.

It was about this time, that Modanlo appears to have begun working with the Iranians. In 2000, the indictment alleges, he began to broker a deal between the Iranian government and his Russian partner, the Polyot Design Bureau in Omsk, Siberia. That agreement culminated in the 2005 launch of a small Iranian satellite. The BBC reported in June 2006 that Russia barred Mandelo from its territory for violating export controls “on missile and space areas” to Iran.

Modanlo and six co-conspirators now face charges of violating export rules. If convicted, they could face 20 years or more in prison for conspiracy, money laundering, and violating the trade embargo.