Sweden aims to launch Europe’s space age – POLITICO
KIRUNA, Sweden — Deep inside the Arctic Circle, the Swedish government is boldly attempting what Britain just failed to do — successfully launching satellites into space.
Europe’s highest political brass formally opened a new spaceport at the Esrange Space Center in Kiruna, far north of Sweden, on Friday and pledged to use the facility as a platform to carry satellites into orbit to potentially provide everything from eye-in-the-sky climate change monitoring to communications services.
“As the first orbital launch site on our mainland, Esrange Spaceport offers an independent European gateway to space,” Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said at the ceremony. “The future of the EU as a space power will also be written in Sweden.”
Her College of Commissioners gathered at Esrange, a facility established at the height of the Cold War that has taken on new geopolitical significance given the ongoing rivalry with China and Russia.
Until now, Europe’s only practical access point to orbit has been from a spaceport at Kourou in French Guiana, operated by the European Space Agency, a Paris-based organization that works with the EU on its own space programs.
It is from the French territory that Europe has launched its Galileo and Copernicus satellite constellations in orbit.
The Esrange Space Center opened in the Arctic Circle in the 1960s as a research center and data relay point, and will soon provide a base for launching satellites, though probably only those weighing less than 1,000 kilograms.
“This spaceport wants to be a place for micro-rockets in the future,” the head of the European Space Agency, Josef Aschbacher, told POLITICO.
Currently, only a handful of countries have the capacity to launch satellites, including China and the United States as well as France and Kazakhstan, which are home to the Baikonur Cosmodrome.
Sweden is not the only European country that dreams of its own access to the stars.
Efforts to fire the first rocket from a spaceport in Cornwall, southwest England, this month ended in failure. Virgin Orbit managed to successfully launch satellites aboard a rocket attached to a souped-up 747 but that encountered mission failure later in the trip.
The spaceport at Cornwall Airport is one of a handful of projects being developed to offer access to orbit from continental Europe, along with a platform off the coast of Germany in the North Sea and one in the Azores of Portugal.
“Europe is working with half a dozen spaceports, that’s interesting from a competitive point of view and that’s what Europe needs,” ESA’s Aschbacher said.
Swedish Space Corporation (SCC) says a maiden satellite from Kiruna is “expected at the turn of 2023/24”, but to turn Esrange into a working launch site, each rocket must first be launched from somewhere else to prove to its neighbors (the Norwegian border is only 200 kilometers away) that it is safe and works, Aschbacher said.
“SSC is in advanced discussions with several potential rocket partners for future orbital launches from Spaceport Esrange,” the national space agency said.
Meanwhile, researchers from private space companies such as Munich-based Isar Aerospace are already hard at work at the Esrange facility testing its own technology, while ESA wants to perform so-called “hop tests” of reusable rocket launch and landing technology at the site, which could help Europe compete with Elon Musk’s SpaceX in the future.
The Kiruna site is seen as strategically important for the EU, not only because satellites have important functions such as monitoring oceans and providing broadband, but also because of geopolitical tensions with Russia.
The commission plans to publish its own plan for how satellites could help the bloc defend itself in March, which could tie into Kiruna as an orbital defense option. “The aim is to improve the resilience of the European space infrastructure and strengthen our common European capabilities,” von der Leyen said.