KIRUNA, Sweden – The road to the reindeer herder’s spring home took him over four frozen lakes and countless snowy hills. When he came to a light dusting of snow, the shepherd Aslak Allas shut down his snowmobile and the overwhelming silence in Sweden’s Arctic broke in.

His reindeer, thousands of them, were nowhere to be seen. “They’re very scared of noise,” Allas explained, pointing to his vehicle.

He then pointed to the distant hills dotted with birch trees, their buds swollen by the warming spring sun. “Now, the noise that comes from there, it’s going to be something else,” sighed Mr. Allas.

That noise is expected to come with a roar next year, when Sweden plans to complete the construction of a rocket-launching complex in the frozen ground north of the Arctic Circle and jump into the commercial space race, the first country in Europe to do so.

With the crystal clear air of the Arctic night and a decent telescope, it is easy to pick up some of the thousands of commercial satellites in shoebox orbiting the earth. Their numbers will explode in the coming decade, powered by the use of bright, reusable rockets developed by innovative American companies such as Elon Musk SpaceX. He and several competitors plan to launch up to 50,000 such satellites into space in the coming years, compared to fewer than 3,000 out there now.

While the United States, China, Russia and several other countries already have space ports, Sweden would be the first orbital launch site for satellites in Europe – capable of launching spacecraft into orbit or interplanetary orbits. The intergovernmental European Space Agency is currently launching its traditional disposable use Ariane rockets from French Guiana.

Several private European companies are design space ports in Europe to accommodate a new generation of smaller rockets. Portugal is watching building one in the Azores, two remote locations have been allocated in the UK and Norway is upgrading its Andoya Space Center.

But no one is as far away as Sweden, which is transforming an old Arctic space research center into a complex with several new cushions for orbital launches and landings. The Esrange Space Center will be one test site for Europe’s first reusable vertical rocket 2022, and it can also perform engine tests.

In 1972, the Swedish government took over the base from the European Space Agency, which no longer needed it. For decades, the Swedes rented out space for smaller, slower research rockets, satellite ground control services and the launch of stratospheric balloons. But with the commercial space race promising new revenue, the state The Swedish space company, which manages the website, offers launch services to private companies that want to send satellites into space.

“We are a bit of a unicorn in the space industry,” says Philip Pahlsson, vice president of strategy and innovation for the Swedish space company, referring to the state ownership of the website. “But we plan to be the strangest company in the government’s portfolio.”

Esrange shares a landing zone of more than 2,000 square kilometers – more than twice the size of Rhode Island – with a local population of mostly bears, wolves, reindeer and a handful of herdsmen like Herr Allas. If a launch were to fail, it would be highly unlikely that it would cause any damage to human settlements.

For some satellites – those launched into polar orbits – an Arctic location offers important benefits. These orbits, which pass over the North and South Poles, are ideal for Earth observation satellites, because as the Earth rotates, the entire surface of the planet passes below. And it takes less energy to start a polar orbit from higher latitudes.

As the space market grows rapidly, Europeans increasingly need to launch sites for smaller rockets carrying smaller satellites, experts say.

“Europe really needs to build infrastructure to get to space,” says Stefan Gustafsson, senior vice president at the Swedish Space Company, in an interview at Stockholm’s headquarters. “We can provide a proper space base.”

That base is located near Kiruna, Sweden’s northernmost city and home to the largest underground iron ore mine in the world. It’s actually so big that several neighborhoods are moved, as the city slowly sinks into the excavated caves below.

A 50-foot-long rocket stands at one of the main intersections, a testament to Sweden’s space ambitions. Space is woven into the fabric of the city.

The Swedish Institute for Space Physics is based in Kiruna, as is Space High School for gifted teens. The space technology The program at Luleå University of Technology, also in Kiruna, attracts doctoral students from all over Europe. A huge dish, which stands out from the forest in a vast white valley, serves as a geographical landmark.

Esrange has many of the attributes of other space ports – high fences and warning signs, and some used rockets are displayed. But it also has a church, a visitor center and the Aurora Hotel, named after the northern lights that color the winter sky. Of course, snow is everywhere, and reindeer wander the terrain (no one knows how to get past the fence), but astronauts and lunar landers are nowhere to be found.

When he led a tour of the site, Pahlsson was easily upset when a photographer started taking pictures. “We have a contract,” he said. “Some of our customers do not like their equipment to be photographed.”

The launch pads for the orbital rockets, mostly piles of construction equipment and materials at this time, rise 40 km from the central site. Pahlsson pointed to a pile of sand during a tour of the site and said that this was the site of their future apartment building.

By the end of next year, he said, they hoped to use the launch site to test Europe’s first reusable rocket, the so-called Themis, after an ancient Greek Titaness which was the personification of divine order.

On this day, the main activity consisted of engine testing of two highly competitive German space launchers, Rocket Factory Augsburg and ISAR Aerospace Technologies.

“You can actually call me a rocket scientist,” said Josef Fleischmann, 30, one of three founders of ISAR. In 2017, he and fellow students won an award by building the fastest podcast in Elon Musk’s competition for ultra-high-speed transport in hyperloop, or travel in a vacuum tube. It caught the attention of Bulent Altan, a former vice president of Space X, who decided to support Fleischmann and his friends.

“Now we have $ 100 million in investments and we’re building rockets.”

“The place seems remote, but for space, this is the place to be,” says Rene Laufer, professor of space technology at Luleå University of Technology. “Also, you do not want to test rockets in your own backyard.”

So far, Esrange has not drawn criticism from environmental activists, but that may change. Solid rocket fuel can leave a heavy carbon footprint and liquid fuels pose a threat to toxicity. The exhaust clouds that form after lifting and during flight are also worrying.

Sweden’s space minister Matilda Ernkrans said in an interview that she expected the base to play a key role in mapping global climate change.

Back in his modest home, Mr. Allas, the reindeer herder, would emphasize that view, and he plans to do something about it, even though his backyard is one of the few that is not connected in any way to the space industry.

Mr. Allas is more than a man with a snowmobile and lots of reindeer. He is chairman of Talma Sami village, one of the larger Sami districts in Sweden. The Sami is Europe’s last indigenous people and lives in Finland, Sweden, Norway and Russia.

In 2019, after an appeal from his district, Allas managed to block some of the expansion plans for the base, and now he is aiming for the upcoming noise pollution.

“They may say we have to start or we’ll lose our customers, but reindeer herding has been here for as long as you can imagine,” Allas said, adding that a legal battle seemed inevitable. “For us, Space Corporation is the oldest intruder in our countries, but we have much older rights.”