Europe Has Big Plans for Swedish Spaceport

Deep in the Swedish forest, where reindeer roam and scientists ski in winter, lies one of Europe's hopes for a spaceport that can ultimately compete with the United States, China, and Russia. For decades, Europe has relied upon the US for its security among the stars. But the Trump administration's "America First" policies, plus a commercial market that's growing exponentially, has prompted Europeans to rethink their approach. The state-owned Esrange Space Center in Kiruna, Sweden, is among the sites building out orbital rocket programs to allow Europe to advance in the global space race and launch satellites from the continent's mainland, the AP reports.

• "The gap is significant," says Hermann Ludwig Moeller, director of the European Space Policy Institute. "I would argue that Europe, to be anywhere relevant in the next five to 10 years, needs to at least double its investment in space. And saying that it would double doesn't mean that it would catch up by the same factor, because you can expect that other regions will also continue to step up." Moeller believes a successful orbital launch from continental Europe could occur within the next year.
• Currently, Europe's only space base capable of launching rockets and satellites into orbit is in sparsely populated French Guiana, an overseas department of France in South America that's roughly 310 miles north of the equator. Otherwise, Europe borrows NASA's Cape Canaveral in Florida.
• In March, Isar Aerospace launched the first test flight of its orbital launch vehicle from the Andøya Spaceport, another site that's part of Europe's efforts to expand its presence in space, on an island in northern Norway. While the rocket crashed into the sea 30 seconds after liftoff, the private German aerospace company had largely ruled out the possibility of the rocket reaching orbit on its first complete flight and deemed the short journey a success.

• Esrange and Andøya date back to the 1960s and much of their space-bound appeal stems from their far-north geography on Earth. Esrange, for example, is owned and operated by the Swedish Space Corporation and based more than 120 miles north of the Arctic Circle. The space center's 30-plus antennas can more easily communicate with satellites orbiting the North Pole compared to infrastructure that's near the equator.
• Most important, perhaps, is its size. The base itself encompasses 2.3 square miles where experts conduct Martian lander parachute tests, suborbital rocket launches, and stratospheric balloon experiments. But its key selling point is Esrange's rocket landing zone: 2,000 square miles of birch, pine and spruce trees spread north across the Swedish tundra, nearly to the Norwegian and Finnish borders. The territory is uninhabited besides the Sami Indigenous reindeer herders who sometimes pass through, and the space center alerts them before any tests occur. The emptiness of the landscape allows scientists to launch and easily recover material for further study.