When Iran’s scientists sent a monkey into space in 2013, the country’s president volunteered to be the first Iranian to blast aloft in a domestically built rocket, possibly as early as 2018.

But the term of that president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, also expired in 2013. And now, apparently, so have Iran’s ambitions for homegrown human spaceflight.

The semiofficial ILNA news agency reported on Wednesday that the government-run space agency had canceled a project to launch a human-carrying rocket. It quoted Mohammad Homayoun Sadr, deputy head of the agency, as saying the $15 billion to $20 billion developmental costs over 15 years had been judged too expensive, according to a translation by The Associated Press.

In January 2013, when Iran said it had successfully launched a monkey named Pishgam — Persian for pioneer — more than 70 miles into the edge of space and then retrieved the animal alive, the experiment was regarded by Iranian scientists as a prelude to human flight within five to eight years. Previously, Iran had sent a mouse, a turtle and worms aloft.